A fine example of this cropped up just now as I was reading “The Defector,” an excellent spy novel by Daniel Silva. Silva is describing the people who work in the Mossad’s Special Ops department: “Its operatives were executioners and kidnappers; buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity…”

Now it could be that Silva paired the word to which –– as I’m sure you’ve guessed –– I refer with “blackmailers” for a reason. Perhaps the dark arts of the Mossad, whose main office is a modest drive from where I live (though unmarked on maps, of course), include buggering people and then blackmailing them. They’re known to have used female agents as a “honey trap,” after all. Why not add to their repertoire the “chocolate come-on”? Or the “bronze bait”?

More likely, I’d concede, is that bugging someone qualifies one, in spy parlance, as a bugger. And I’d certainly agree that maybe this jumped off the page only because of the little bit of Benny Hill that lives on in me…

But it highlighted to me how a writer can be ambushed by words in many different ways.

Needless to add, for those who know Silva’s work, it didn’t put me off “The Defector,” which is a superb example of classy writing and thrilling pace.

Still the rules have been turned into a book and are quoted with something a little more mystical than simple reverence by crime writers when I go to crime conferences.

Some of the rules are pretty silly. No adverbs? Well, if you’re a crappy writer who dumps adverbs all over the place, then you ought to get rid of adverbs. But someone who writes well ought to be able to use all the tools of language. Would you tell a great composer not to write in B minor? Or not to use C sharp?

When I mentioned this on stage with a couple of other writers earlier this year (just after the pro-Elmore symphony had been sounded) I registered a degree of hostility on the part of at least one of the others on the panel rather akin to my having told a bunch of Orthodox Jews that they ought to expand their palate to include pork.

When Elmore goes deeper into his rules, he usually says something like “Don’t do X unless you’re Margaret Atwood [or some other writer], who can do it without sounding like shit.” In other words, if you’re a good writer, don’t follow Elmore’s rules for writing.

But what about breaking them all at once? The National Post has a competition running in which it asks readers to write a single sentence that breaks all Elmore’s rules.

It’s a little tricky, because some of Elmore’s rules (eg. Avoid prologues) aren’t really sentence-specific. But here’s my attempt:

Rain threatened suddenly, as it had for days and would go on doing, over the art-deco red-brick main street with its hardware store, candy store, video store and tattoo parlor, no matter how much the delicately featured red-headed woman with the up-turned nose opined tartly that the weather “would turn out just ticketty-boo, bejasus!” while she was on a visit from Ireland to complete her studies in a subject irrelevant to the book or her role in it.

I think that also proves that Elmore’s rules aren’t rules for good writing. They’re just rules to avoid being totally crap. Which is worthwhile…he said, hopefully.

The opening of “Saint Fiacre” (I’m going to look at the opening, rather than the opening paragraph, because the paragraphs are short, staccato) is laden with the strangeness of waking up in an unaccustomed place, and most of all the dismal return to a place whence one has fled. Here it is:

A timid scratching at the door; the sound of an object being put on the floor; a furtive voice:

“It’s half past five. The first bell for Mass has just been rung…”

“Are you taking communion?”

All this is a re-creation of the small village atmosphere Maigret believed he had left behind him when he went to Paris as a young man to become a police officer. It’s a very meaningful atmosphere for me. For a couple of decades now, I’ve lived around the world as a journalist and writer. It’s been 22 years since I quit the backwater where I grew up. If I’d been a happy kid, I’d probably never have left. So whenever I go back for a visit, I become quiet, silenced by a bitter nostalgia and regret. Maybe that’s why I love this somber, atmospheric early episode featuring “le Commissaire” going back to his childhood village.

Maigret appeared in so many movies and television adaptations–for Saint-Fiacre alone there are a 1959 French-language movie with Jean Gabin and two British TV versions–that it’s easy to think of him with the familiarity we often ascribe to endlessly reproduced old-timers like Miss Marple. But Simenon had a lot more in common with his great U.S. crime-writing contemporaries. In Saint-Fiacre, he makes the lugubrious Raymond Chandler look like a breezy teenager skipping down a sunny small-town street in her bobby socks. Imagine that.

Simenon’s first editor wrote to him: “Your books aren’t real police novels. They aren’t scientific. They don’t play by the rules. There’s no love story in them. There’re no sympathetic characters. You won’t have a thousand readers.” Well, 550 million copies printed shows what that guy knew about potential sales. But he was right about the way the Belgian writer’s books worked. No real good guys and nothing–certainly not love–untainted by the grasping desire to escape a society of dying traditions and internal immigration.

The Saint-Fiacre Affair begins, then, with Maigret waking up in the inn of the village of Saint-Fiacre. At first he doesn’t recognize where he is. As it dawns upon him, he’s flooded with a heavy sense of darkness. He has returned to the village where he grew up to investigate a crime which is about to happen. (His office in the Paris police headquarters received a note saying that “A crime will be committed at the Saint-Fiacre Church during the first mass of the days of the dead.”)

As he strolls through the village, people glance at him curiously. They seem to recognize him, but can’t place the face of the son of the former steward at the local château, a face that left their community 35 years previously to pursue a career in the capital. All other traces of Maigret’s family are gone from the village and he wanders it sensing somehow that its very stones are unwelcoming.

When characters eventually recognize him or when he owns up to being from Saint-Fiacre, they seem to wonder what the hell could’ve brought him back. It’s clear they don’t trust him. There’s no hale slap on the back or curiosity about what he’s been doing all these years. Simenon captures the isolation and suspicion of the French peasant for the big city perfectly. What these people are signaling to Maigret–and what he instinctively realizes–is that he may have been born in Saint-Fiacre, but the moment he left he ceased to belong to it. They owe him nothing. He’s on his own.

If you’ve ever been back to a place where you weren’t happy as a kid, a place from which you wanted to escape, you’ll feel as though you’re reading your diary, not a detective novel.

At the first mass, the Countess of Saint-Fiacre dies of a heart attack. With his crime delivered as promised, Maigret uncovers a clue at the scene and tracks the killer. But it’s really his own despondent sense of alienation that’s at the heart of this novel, and it’s there right from the first paragraph.

If that sounds like a spoof, you surely know who I’m caricaturing. We decided last week that you couldn’t do much better than the opening paragraph of Hammett’s “Red Harvest” for an introduction to the narrative voice, narrator, place and tone of the entire novel. But if anyone could beat it, we’d have to look at Raymond Chandler.

The grumpy god of the gumshoe genre claimed not to have much time for the
idea of a classic in crime writing. In one of his essays, he wrote that contemporary writers who aimed for historical fiction, social vignette, or broad canvas would never surpass “Henry Esmond”, “Madame Bovary”, or “War and Peace”. Crime writers, on the other hand, would easily be able to
devise a better mystery than the ones detailed in “The Hound of the
Baskervilles” or “The Purloined Letter”. “It would be rather more difficult
not to,” he wrote.

Still, the poet with the pipe (okay, no more quirky names for Ray) proved
himself wrong. Or rather he proved that he was right not to focus so much
on the mystery element and, instead, to build a mysterious atmosphere and a sardonic sense of humor. From the opening paragraph.

This is how he starts a long 1950 short story called “Red Wind”:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry
Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair
and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every
booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving
knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even
get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Like the opening paragraph of “Red Harvest,” this gives us all the elements
we’d expect. It also tells you a lot about the narrator and his lifestyle.
The booze parties, and the sense of being gypped at the cocktail lounge.

But the opening paragraph which might be said to define an entire genre ––
and the sub-genres of attempts to copy the true representatives of the
genre, and also to parody it –– starts Chandler’s 1949 novel “The Little
Sister”:

The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “*Philip
Marlowe…Investigations*.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a
reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the
year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is
locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not
locked. Come on in –– there’s nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle
fly. But not if you’re from Manhattan, Kansas.

That’s now a staple of the genre and, just as much, of its parodic/iconic
avatar –– the detective innocently awaiting the moment when the lady arrives (or in this case, telephones) his shabby office. But what makes it so compelling is the voice of Marlowe, with its sense of regret at having become involved in the story and its unspoken acknowledgement of the inevitability of a repeat performance. After all, if Marlowe truly learned the lessons he claims to have taken on board, he wouldn’t be who he is. He’d be corrupted or cynical. Of course he’s neither.

It’s this subtext of honor (the knight in shining armor element of Marlowe’s character, as Chandler called it) that allowed the Epistolarian of Evil (sorry, I said I wouldn’t do that again, didn’t I) to elevate himself above the many who have copied him.

What makes a great first paragraph? And which are the greatest? We all have favorites, some of which have become clichéd –– as happens to anything, whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, or if you grew up in a family that was unhappy in its own way. See what I mean?

In general it’s hard to beat Hemingway’s opening to “The Sun Also Rises” for laying out the narrator’s character, as well as the character being described: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed with that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”

But what about crime fiction? Over the next few weeks, I’m going to look at some of the best first lines and paragraphs in the genre. Next week, we’ll do a little Chandler (how did you guess?) and then we’ll be on to Simenon, who was a nasty enough man to write perfectly bitter downbeat prose from the very start of his books.

Let’s begin, though, with the man who in many ways beats them all: Dashiell Hammett.

I bet you think I’m going to talk about “The Maltese Falcon,” which in the first paragraph describes Sam Spade as looking “rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.”

But I’m not.

No, we’re going to have a quick gander at the opening of “Red Harvest,” Hammett’s first novel, in which his Continental Op heads to a corrupt small town. It starts this way:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

Here we get the introduction to the Op and a lot of insight into him. We learn that he’s a man who has been drinking in a bar in Butte, which implies that he likes rough places and cheap alcohol. He knows the jokes thieves make and so we learn that the “men who could manage their r’s” were thieves too. We also get our introduction to Personville, which is after all to be a central character, as it were, in the book.

Most important, perhaps, given that this was Hammett’s first full-length novel: We get the voice. The voice of Hammett and the Op. The worldly, experienced voice of a man who has mixed with criminals long enough to have heard repeated references to one small town over the course of years. A man who, in the course of the book, will do criminal things for decent ends.

It also has that Hammett trademark: the kicker in the final sentence of the opening paragraph (note that the “blond Satan” does this for “The Maltese Falcon.”) If a writer’s trying to hook a reader into his book with this first paragraph –– on the basis that it’s as far as a casual browser will bother to read –– he has to view the opening paragraph the way a journalist does his lead. It must include information about the kind of book it is and where it might be going. But it must also give us a clever line that jumps our eye further into the book –– once you’ve read the second paragraph, you’ll probably figure you ought to buy it.

Unless, that is, you’re one of those bums who doesn’t buy books and reads them in bookshops without paying for them. If you’re one of those guys, then hear this: I won’t be copying out any more of “Red Harvest” on this blog. Buy it and read it.

Next week: Part 2 –– Big Ray C. Meantime, see if you can guess which Chandler book gets the nod for the best opening paragraph.

The hero of Martin Cruz Smith’s excellent series set in the Soviet Union and, later, Russia (with stops in Cuba, Ukraine, Germany and Alaska) is the closest today’s crime fiction gets to Chandler’s idea that “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” In many ways, Cruz Smith is the closest among current crime writers to the keen yet elliptical style of plot development perfected by Chandler. (In Chandler’s case, that was, as
he admitted, largely because he didn’t really keep track of the plot; I
suspect that’s not the issue with Cruz Smith.)

[Note: To qualify my lead paragraph, I ought to quote Chandler once again:
“There are as many bad literary novels as bad detective novels. The bad
literary novels just don’t get published.” That’s not true anymore, as
anyone who’s ever tossed a copy of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America”
at the wall will vouch. Still detective fiction retains that reputation among certain circles, and indeed a lot of crap still washes through the sleuthing sluices.]

I’ve read all the Renko novels, as well as some of Cruz Smith’s standalone
books. From the perspective of a writer, I’ve observed with enormous
pleasure the elements that make Renko work so well, and of course the
manner in which Cruz Smith puts them to effect.

A key to this is Renko’s voice. His apparently deep disillusion is something of a trick. Renko’s father was a Stalinist general and as an investigator he’s constantly measuring himself against that old bastard – and regretting the similarities he finds. This continuity between the old USSR and the new FSU grounds Renko. It’s why he’s not a drunk like some of his colleagues, and why he isn’t corrupt like the others: he’s a hard-edged idealist, like his father, who happens to have inherited the humanity of his mother.

Cruz Smith’s Russia is the perfect backdrop for Renko’s tawdry shining
armor. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cruz Smith has painted the
breakdown of society better than any nonfiction or journalism I’ve read.

It’s what I’ve tried to do with my Palestinian crime novels. A place over-covered by journalists, like Gaza or Moscow, might seem to have little new to yield for a fiction writer. But the element overlooked by journalism and nonfiction – which sees everything in terms of politics – is that politics in such places is merely the thin end of a gangster wedge which must reach to every corner of society and go to sordid lengths to maintain control. Thus any murder Renko uncovers (such as the whore/dancer of “Three Stations,” his latest) reaches directly to the upper echelons of the government, the security establishment or (in the case of “Three Stations”) the new oligarchic economy.

That’s what makes Renko so dangerous that the bad guys want to stop him.

And that’s an element detective writers ought to note: when your sleuth is
after the truth, are the villains trying to stop him merely to avoid prison
for their personal misdeeds? Or are they protecting a corrupt, monolithic
system that our hero will uncover and, in his small way, smother around the
edges?

This kind of context is what makes Renko the most compelling detective in
contemporary crime fiction.

The point had been made, however. The Ellroy act (and it is surely an act, for those of you who’ve ever seen the man speak in public) had been rolled out. The pose, struck.

Does every crime writer need such an act? Would all of us benefit from one? And what should mine be?

Well, I can’t be the urbane, sensitive, wise-cracking Brit with a strong jaw and penetrating eyes. Why not? Because that’s who I am (ask my wife, please), and this is supposed to be an act, remember.

What are the alternatives?

It seems there are more than a few on offer. A crime writer can pretend to be Philip Marlowe. He can pretend to be Philip Marlowe on speed (cf. Ellroy). He can be the gruff city-room editor type. He can be the my-boots-have-walked-in-blood type (as a former war correspondent, I’ve done a little of that.) He can be arch and a little vampiric, a gentleman thief, Raffles and George Sanders.

He could just put on a Swedish accent.

(I’m not examining the possibilities for female crime writers here. I’m prepared to put on an act, but not to cross-dress. At least, not in front of my readers. Again, ask my wife…)

I could act distant from my readers….

………..

No, that’s not going to work. Not in the blogosphere.

I could take my real crimes and exploit them. (Like Ellroy, with his murdered mother, his drug use, and his teenage habit of breaking into women’s homes and sniffing their panties.) Is the world ready for a teenage shoplifter/crime writer? No, the crimes have to be more revealingly bad than that, showing you to be a good guy now because you’re able to write about the nasty stuff you pulled when you were younger. I’ll have to discuss this with my girlfriends of 20 years ago and with the other fellows from the alternative band I played in on the Lower East Side in the mid-1990s….

So the persona is evidently a work in progress. Any suggestions are welcome.

It seems to me titles in the thriller world have moved away from any kind of descriptive or even tangential link to the plot or characters of the book. They have become in many cases an adjunct to the cover design. A “blurb” (the laudatory comments dashed all over the jacket by other writers or reviewers) distilled to two or three words. As though the title were only there as encouragement to a purchase, rather than being part of the book itself.

There are plenty of examples among today’s top writers. But let’s take the example of Lee Child’s excellent Jack Reacher novels. I just caught up on a couple I’d missed. They’re called “Without Fail” and “Nothing to Lose.”

“Without Fail” is about a plot to assassinate the Vice President of the US. I couldn’t tell you why it’s called “Without Fail.” As far as I remember, no one says “without fail” or tells Reacher he has to do something “without fail.” He drinks coffee at every opportunity – without fail, you might say – but I don’t think that’s why Child called the book “Without Fail.”

In “Nothing to Lose” Reacher finds himself in rural Colorado investigating a dead body he stumbles across in the desert. I was left unsure which of the characters had “nothing to lose.” Perhaps it was Reacher, or the people (no spoilers here) who turn out to be involved in the thing he’s investigating. Or maybe it’s the reader in the airport bookshop…

In any case, these latest two come on the back of my earlier Reacher reading, where I pondered why “Running Blind” was called “Running Blind” (despite the tagline on the cover which said something like, “Reacher doesn’t know what the hells’ going on, in fact he’s RUNNING BLIND”. Even though Reacher seemed to know what was going to happen in that book a long time before everyone else.) I still don’t know why “Worth Dying For” was called “Worth Dying For,” because Reacher never seems about to die and the people who actually die do so for despicable reasons that aren’t worth dying for.

“61 Hours” was called “61 Hours” because it took the form of a countdown. But why 61 hours? Pretty arbitrary, but at least when I stand before a shelf of Child books in a store I’m able to remember that I’ve read that one. Otherwise I get confused. It’s almost as though publishers want thrillers to have such vague titles that befuddled readers will buy the same book twice.

My novels have titles related to the theme or events or characters of the book. If you’re looking at a shelf of my books and you’ve read some of them, you’ll recall that “A Grave in Gaza” was the one set in Gaza; that “The Collaborator of Bethlehem” was about a collaborator and was set in Bethlehem. “The Samaritan’s Secret” was about a secret held by a Samaritan. If you haven’t read “The Fourth Assassin,” you’ll run mentally through the books you have read and think: “They didn’t have four assassins in them, but this one does, so I haven’t read it yet. Let’s buy it.” And you wouldn’t come to the end of the book saying to yourself: “Hey, I only counted three assassins,” or “Hey, there weren’t any assassins in the book at all. Were there?”

Surely a good title with specific associations to the book does a better job than the genrewide vagueness for which I’ve singled out (with apologies) Lee Child? I’d like to invite readers of this blog to retitle some of their favorite novels as though they were contemporary thrillers. Here are a couple of suggestions to get you going:

Blood in the Snow (War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy)

No Hope (The Trial by Franz Kafka)

Down in Flames (Catch-22 by Joseph Heller)

Last Chance (Persuasion by Jane Austen)

Ghost Chain (A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens)

Dead Sleep (Dead Sleep by Greg Iles)… Oh wait, that’s not in the spirit of the game…

Anyhow, suggestions awaited.

A recent Cornell University study found that 85 percent of amazon.com’s “top reviewers” had received free gifts from vendors. And 78 percent had reviewed the products. The “top reviewers” often strayed far from their expertise, if they even have one, boosting their productivity with reviews of minor domestic items so that they would maintain their “top reviewer” status and continue to receive free stuff.

It’s a corrupt system. Well, I live in the Middle East and I’ve become accustomed to corruption. So why have I had to bring Mrs. Roosevelt into the equation?

Because the corruption touches me personally, as it does every writer. Take the Amazon Vine program, which is mentioned in the Cornell study. As I understand it, Vine allows “top reviewers” to choose from a list of books, which they then receive free from the publisher on the understanding that they’ll write a review.

The publisher wants to participate because the number of reviews (as well as the quality of the reviews) seems to be part of amazon.com’s secret ranking system.

The problem appears to me to be that there’s a big difference between electing to pay for a book you want to read and clicking on a list of books you can receive free – and there’s likely to be just as big a difference in the kind of review you write.

A case in point was my third novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET. On amazon.co.uk the book was offered by my UK publisher Atlantic as part of the Vine program. Suddenly I had more than 10 times the number of reviews for this book than I’d had for my first two novels.

But the proportion of somewhat or very negative reviews was much higher. If you don’t put money on the line for a book, you’re clearly more likely to start reading with a lackluster attitude. You’re more likely to ditch the book after a few chapters, or to skim to the end. And indeed if you look at the reviews for THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET you’ll see that many of the 2 or 3 star reviews were written by Vine reviewers who state quite clearly that they either stopped reading after a chapter or two, or that they skimmed to the end. (By contrast my first two books received mostly 5 and 4 star reviews.)

The skimmers in particular seem to like pointing out problems with the plot and things they think I missed out – things which someone who wasn’t skimming the book would’ve seen were quite clearly there in print in the book. Other reviewers apologized for giving a negative review to a book they’d stopped reading after a few chapters, then gave it 1 star anyway.

This is an issue that goes beyond the number of stars a book receives on amazon – a factor which I now entirely ignore in my purchasing of books online. There are ill-paid mass reviewers on many online sites who write hundreds of tiny reviews a day. As the New York Times recently reported, studies show these bogus reviews are more likely to use the first person and exclamation points, but they’re still hard to spot.

From a psychological perspective, I also noticed a tendency among “top reviewers” to relate their reviews less to the book and more to the reviews of other “top reviewers.” That could cut both ways. There’s a herd mentality at work: everyone else likes it so I’ll give it three stars even though I didn’t read it. Or a contrariness that makes a reviewer stand out of the crowd: everyone else likes it, so I’ll give it 1 star even though I didn’t read it.

One might call this the ultimate example of the trick we all fall for every time we go online. We believe that the information online – including what we write for blogs or on Facebook – has a value in itself. In fact it’s only there as a buffer for the ads amazon and Google and Yahoo slip in amongst it. This is why all the Scandinavian “information wants to be free” idiots are the stupidest of libertarian pseudoanarchists – they’re doing the work of the big corporations by providing more information (free) which capitalists can translate into eyes online and cents per click.

The difference in the case of online reviews is that either they’re a form of payment for services received from the vendor or that they’re written by someone who’s even more deluded about the nature of his/her participation in the distribution of information than the sweatshoppers who’re paid to write the reviews.

One last stat from the Cornell study: 40 percent of online reviewers are actually writers. So you’d think the reviews would read better, wouldn’t you?

What did the editors do? They ordered correspondents to write hard news. Because they didn’t care what readers wanted. They wished to appear as serious journalists before their peers, and serious journalists write tough hard news stories. Even if no one wants to read them.

I was put in mind of this as I listened to a BBC Open Book podcast about whether crime fiction has become too gory. Specifically whether descriptions of violence – and the torture of women in particular – have gone too far. I interpret that to mean: whether the violence is indulged for its own sake, rather than for the sake of plot or character development.

After listening to the show I felt as though I had been tuned in to a discussion by European liberals about multiculturalism – or some other subject on which all “decent” types agree and then simply talk about the nuances of their shared position, rather than ever saying “hey, there’s a case to answer here.”

I’ve seen a great deal of violence in my life. I’ve been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years. I’ve seen people shot, blown up, burned to death, horribly maimed, and I’ve been threatened myself. I take no pleasure in that and I have no sympathy for those who would treat others’ suffering as entertainment. Perhaps that’s why I believe there is very much a case for crime fiction to answer: too many writers and presumably readers appear to be indulging in psychotically prurient interest.

That isn’t to say there’s no violence in my novels. But I’m very careful about its purpose, and I don’t require it to take place in front of the reader’s eyes, as it were. I try to think about Chandler’s great dictum on Hammett – that he put murder back in the hands of those who actually commit it in real life. No doubt some of those people are sadists, but most are criminals and most murders are committed with dispatch. That’s how I like it to be done in my books: by a criminal, not a psycho, and quickly, as a piece of business.

But the BBC show focuses on what one of the authors on the program, Tess Gerritsen, correctly says is an increasing trend: torture for torture’s sake. Or at best, torture to scare the reader.

It seemed to me – and once you’ve gone to the link and listened, I’d like to know what you think – that some of the panelists discussed any opposition to such violence as being a kind of censorship. As if crime fiction was a persecuted genre which might find its horizons limited by the prudish and the squeamish, if it once allows that it might’ve overindulged in a disgusting neurosis. No one’s trying to ban crime fiction, but it’s worth looking at what the sicko branch of the genre tells us about readers and writers.

For example, the panel didn’t really confront the perverse sexual element of much of the violence in today’s crime fiction.

Mariella Frostrup, the presenter, began the segment by reading a brief passage from a new Jo Nesbo book in which a woman’s face is penetrated from different directions by needles of about seven inches in length. Even if the author didn’t hail from the home of XXX porno, you wouldn’t need to be a horny 14-year-old boy to think of gangbang blow jobs.

Snuff movies are generally accepted as being dangerous to the minds of those who watch them, even when the sex snuff is simulated. Is this kind of crime fiction porn dangerous to readers? That depends on the relative sexual inadequacy of the reader, I expect. But it’s fair to say that it’s reflective of a juvenile masturbatory quality in the writer.

The competition among crime writers to depict the most horrific of tortures reminds me of the ludicrous bar-stool boasting of drunken men eager to tell everyone within five yards about the potency of their enormous, inexorable tool.

I’ve read a couple of Nesbo novels without much interest—apparently it’s frequently cold in Norway, most people are good, and Nesbo is into British pop music. I slogged through the first Stieg Larsson wishing it really had been edited and rewritten by his common-law wife, as she asserts, because I hope she’d have cut 300 pages—and a lot more quickly than his nasties cut the poor little Salander girl. I’ve grimaced at the sadism of some recent US and UK thrillers, particularly the ones which go for everyone’s darkest fear—the torture of children. And I’ve dropped off to sleep as Inspector Wallander rambles on about his distress at the psychos taking over Sweden (while his ponderous master Mankell describes what those psychos do, in detail).

If these and other writers indulging in extreme violence have never seen the destruction and blood that I’ve seen, I’m happy for them. But I’m not so happy for their readers.