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A Week in Books: Extreme violence in crime fiction

Jane Jakeman
Saturday 12 April 2003 00:00 BST
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There is a growing tendency to extreme violence in the crime fiction that passes through my hands as a reviewer. And I have to admit a growing insensitivity to cruelty in myself – both as writer and reviewer. I haven't got to the state where I think this a desirable or "promotable" tendency, though it certainly mirrors what is happening in our culture.

Two current crime novels have enraged me in different ways, but the ultimate cause of disgust is the same: their stomach-churning content of extreme sadism. They are The Blind Man of Seville by Robert Wilson (HarperCollins), and David Hewson's A Season for the Dead (Macmillan). Wilson's earlier A Small Death in Lisbon quite rightly won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger, and he has written several complex and atmospheric psychological thrillers. This could have been another, if Wilson had not wrapped it up in the gruesome packaging of torture that seems now to rule supreme in publishing.

An old man is discovered, murdered, with his eyelids cut off because he was forced to watch something too horrible to look at! Yes, kiddies, it's the bogeyman, leaping out to sabotage credulity in this otherwise finely written picture of Seville and a moody Jefé of police, Javier Falcon: a character evoked with some brilliant passages. The story of his family is intimately bound up with events. Interwoven with the modern narrative are fascinating digressions into the Spanish past. This is a work that ambitiously seeks to investigate Spanish history through its characters.

Unfortunately the realistic, and truly horrifying, brutalities of war are nullified by the theatrical trappings of cruelty that disfigure this book. At least a matador gets gored to death. Three cheers for the bull. I finger the publisher as responsible for this marred work from a fine writer. HarperCollins has decimated its crime list, which was until very recently adventurous and intelligent. I suspect poor Robert Wilson felt he had to write nasty to stay in print.

As for A Season for the Dead, the once-proud house of Macmillan claims that it is "in the same vain (sic) as Donna Leon and Michael Dibdin". Apart from the fact that their readers can spell, the only thing fans will recognise is that David Hewson's book is set in Italy. In Rome, a psychopath is carrying out murders based on Christian martyrdoms: flaying alive, griddle-roasting and so forth. Yet the sadism paradoxically renders it almost inoffensive. It cannot be rescued from the ludicrous realms of Grand Guignol by cardboard characters, who include an evil priest who picks up the petrol for the St Lawrence-style barbecue.

Wilson takes cognisance of the trend to ultra-violence, and audaciously foregrounds it in a discussion of the art of Damien Hirst, with its butchered creatures, and the plastinated real bodies in Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds. His characters predict a show entitled The Real Art of Killing, or perhaps (a nice stroke of wit) Killing Real Art.

I take comfort from the bestseller charts, where the top crime writers come consistently from the same old stable: Rankin, Walters, Rendell. Publishers have been falsely led to encourage the new sadism by the odd roaring success, such as Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter books. But those were special cases, because of their huge film following. The current crop will lose the traditional readership of crime fiction, which doesn't fancy torture sessions. What readers will they gain? The thought raises a shudder.

Jane Jakeman's crime novel 'In the Kingdom of Mists' is published in paperback by Black Swan.

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