In These Crime Books, The City Is As Much A Character As A Backdrop

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“I don’t know what London’s coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.”
― Noël Coward

 

Noel Coward wasn’t a crime writer, but I think he was right. The rise of the great metropolitan city in the twentieth century neatly dovetails with the rise of crime fiction. For me, the city is where crime writing seems most at home. Cities are full of grifters on the make, the downtrodden and the lost, and the sound of easy money. The D.N.A. of crime fiction.

Maybe it’s the memory of dark shadows and dangerous streets in American Noir movies, maybe it’s the fact I’ve lived in cities all my life but I can’t separate the two. Not that there aren’t great crime novels set in the countryside or in villages in the middle of nowhere, there are, plenty of them. It’s just the books that have affected me or influenced me the most were set in the grime and glamour of big cities.

In the best of urban crime fiction, the city becomes as much of a character as a backdrop. Its unique nature, whether Lagos or Berlin, informs everything that happens in the book. Can you imagine Phillip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther without Berlin? Rebus without Edinburgh? These detectives are products of where they live, the city is their story.

I’ve picked six books to talk about that were revelations for me. Books that showed me new cities, new ways of writing, and made me wish I had written them. It’s a collection of books that have nothing in common but the huge part the cities in which they are set play. Welcome to the mean streets…

 

David Peace, The Red Riding Quartet

Of course, I am now going to completely contradict myself. The Red Riding Quartet is set in an English county not just a single city. Peace’s Yorkshire of the seventies is an astonishing creation. Historically accurate yet wildly imaginative, it takes the nature of the county and its people and reimagines them into a kind of waking nightmare of hate and betrayal and revenge. A place you would not want to go.

In these four books, Yorkshire becomes a hellscape controlled by the police and the corrupt establishment they serve. In this situation, the macabre becomes the normal. Children are killed, a gypsy camp is torched, pornography and sexual exploitation are rife and signs of the chaos to come are everywhere, a chaos no one in the books can escape from.

The most amazing thing is that, in these four books, in the midst of all this, we are kept in touch with reality. Yorkshire and the city of Leeds are portrayed with a forensic eye. We are grounded by the every day, the terrible programs on the television, the pubs, the takeaway food, the taxis, and the hair salons. The day-to-day grind of Britain in the seventies. As the book famously says ‘This is the North, we do things differently here’ and Peace does. He writes a city and a county that are half real and half-imagined but which always illuminate the story he tells. No fictional place could ever be as disturbing as Peace’s Yorkshire.

Peter Corris, The Empty Beach

The Empty Beach was the breakthrough book in Peter Corris’ Cliff Hardy series. It’s set in Sydney in the early eighties, specifically around Bondi Beach. Hardy is a private investigator, of a type not unfamiliar to anyone who had read a few crime novels so it’s really the milieu that makes the book work. Bondi is half paradise and half a city of broken dreams. Harsh sunlight and unforgiving heat lend the novel an almost claustrophobic edge. There’s no escape from the light.

As the novel progresses the underbelly of Bondi, the side tourists don’t see, starts to dominate. What lurks in the long shadows of the Australian sun starts to emerge and the dream of a beach paradise turns very sour. Cliff Hardy emerges as a character defiantly hanging on to doing what is right.

This book was one of the touchstones of a new kind of Australian crime writing. Books and writers became less in awe of America and forged a kind of fiction that operated in a unique Australian space. The Empty Beach may not be the best Australian noir, or even Corris’ best book but it has a quality few others have. It remakes a place, Bondi, in an author’s imagination and permanently changed how we think about it.

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Louise Welsh, The Cutting Room

Glasgow is a city which I’m very familiar. The best writers can make a familiar city, a new city, a place you think you know but you don’t. In The Cutting Room, Louise Welch simply carved out a new Glasgow. No hard men, no long-suffering women, no razor kings, no clichés about the city that run from the thirties until now.

Her hero Rilke is ostensibly an auctioneer, but he’s really a connoisseur of things. Of the feel of them, the patina from the people who have used them, the smell of them. It makes sense that the crime he becomes involved in is discovered through an object. A fading black and white photograph. The object rather than the flesh.

His Glasgow is one of faded grandeur and tightly kept secrets. No one is quite who they seem, including Rilke. His homosexuality, hidden from some, plain to others is like the city he lives in, half hidden in shadow and more complex than it seems. Welsh’s Glasgow is embodied in Rilke and it in him. It’s a perfect match.

Martin Holmen, Clinch

Clinch, published in 2016, is the first of the Harry Kvist trilogy. Set in Stockholm in the early thirties and our hero Harry (good name) is an ex-boxer who now acts as muscle for anyone who’ll pay him. This is not the Stockholm we know today, clean, tidy and affluent. This is a city of the have and have not. It’s full of pawnbrokers and loan sharks, broken down sailors, and young people trying to survive. This Stockholm is poor, full of people shivering in tiny unheated flats trying to scrape together enough to keep going.

Harry, being a mysteriously attractive man as lead characters always are, uses his sexual prowess to navigate all sides of the city. Rich and poor, gay and straight. Harry is desperate to avoid being charged with a crime he didn’t commit, and this set-up allows us to follow him from the docks to expensive hotels in an effort to prove his innocence. The book motors along like a good detective novel should and leaves us with a vivid picture of a city and a very singular kind of hero. Highly recommended.

Caleb Carr, The Alienist

The Alienist is a historical mystery set in turn of the century New York. Lazlo Kreizler is The Alienist of the title. An alienist being the word used at the time for a sort of proto-psychiatrist. Against general opposition and suspicion, Kreizler uses his unusual talents to solve a series of murders with the help of his staff and pal John Moore, a wealthy newspaper reporter. The book was so successful when it was published in 1994 that it spawned its own mini-genre in which the crimes are solved by the first psychiatrists or even Sigmund Freud himself.

What’s so astonishing about the book is the insight into ‘Gilded Age’ New York. Carr was a historian before he wrote the book, and it certainly shows. But the research doesn’t lie heavy or stop the forward movement of the narrative, He manages to use his historical research to enlighten and add to the page-turning aspect of the novel. Like Luc Sante’s Low Life the book introduces us to a New York that is wonderfully strange.

It features Theodore Roosevelt and dive bars, unimaginable wealth and child prostitutes. It’s a portrait of New York full of industrial fortunes and immigrants fresh off the boat struggling to survive. It’s a remarkable achievement, huge in scope and narrative drive. If you haven’t read do yourself a favor and get a copy.

A.D. Miller, Snowdrops

Set in Russia in the early 2000’s Snowdrops is a thriller that utilizes the ‘gold-rush days of a boomtown Moscow as an integral part of the story of Nick, an English lawyer as he becomes more and more deeply involved in the seamier side of the city.

This is a Moscow running hot on dodgy deals and massive financial risks and gains if you have the nerve and Nick is there to help make those things happen. He’s been kind of morally absent facilitator, and this is his confession. And this confession is a journey through the Moscow of jeweled Rolexes on gangster’s wrists, gold American Express cards and sex clubs used for corporate entertaining.

The Snowdrops of the title are the dead bodies revealed when the Spring thaws start. Some of them are drunks who just didn’t make it home, some have bullet holes in the back of their heads. In this lawless Moscow, nobody seems to care much either way. The book cleverly uses these ‘snowdrops’ in the opening chapters to point the way. As the book progresses more is revealed. More about Nick and his mysterious girlfriend Masha and more about what Moscow has become and the price everyone has to pay for this city of the new rich.

 

So there we are. Six crime novels in six different cities. Each treats the city in a slightly different way but always integrates it into the very fiber of the book. Each novel is as much about the wonder and the failure of its respective city as it is about a murder or a missing bag of money. Don’t take my word for it. Read them.

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