The Revolt of the Pendulum (11 page)

It’s been a long time since Sherlock Holmes cracked his first case, and by now every country in the world must have at least one fictional detective with half a dozen novels to his name.
Some countries seem to have half a dozen fictional detectives with twenty or thirty novels each. Can’t even one of these current sleuths be surrounded by classy prose like Raymond
Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, so that we can get the art thrill and the thriller thrill both at once?
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.
Great idea, great
sound, great sociological significance. But above all, an eventful narrative to make you read on. Something unputdownable, to make you feel less bad about the unpickupable, such as
The Wings of
the Dove
, which surely deserves everlasting blame for the kind of sentence it so wilfully refuses to include. ‘Kate Croy looked up at the fully dressed but headless corpse hanging from
the ceiling fan and realised with a surge of fear that unless there was another equally well-tailored man with the same cuff-links, this was her father . . .’

If the author does that kind of stuff well enough, he starts counting as literature. That’s the possibility that keeps us, the readers, on the case: the search for the gripping story that
counts as good writing as well. It could be that we are dodging our obligations to high art, but for as long as Patricia Highsmith brings a poetic touch to the narrative details of how the central
character of
Deep Water
just happens, in the swimming pool at night, to lean on the rival for his wife’s affections and hold him under, are we really going to kick ourselves for not
having finished reading that novel by Willa Cather? There can be no question that the best genre fiction has always aimed, and sometimes successfully, at usurping literature’s place. The
question is about the extent to which the crime writers have dominated genre fiction. In answer to that, even the science-fiction writers would have to admit that the crime writers have pretty well
taken over. Magic sells more copies because magic includes J. K. Rowling, but crime has more writers, with a different crime-fighter for every writer.

In all the European languages, there were many famous fictional crime-fighters after the demise of Sherlock Holmes and before the advent of Maigret, but it was Maigret’s prolific inventor,
Georges Simenon, who really started the crime novel on the way to its current aspiration to seriousness. Supposedly helping to fuel the aspiration, but perhaps also helping to ensure that it can
rarely attain its object, is the presence of a recognisably characterised detective. There had always been a space-warp area in which gifted writers wrote
noir
books that hovered trembling
between thrills and thoughtfulness, but without a star detective the gifted writers had trouble writing enough of them, and one of the imperatives of the genre-fiction business is that you must
publish enough books to survive in a market where everybody else is publishing a lot of books for the same reason. It helps to have your own sleuth and get people hooked on him. Simenon, with the
organisation and instincts of a Colombian drug-runner, got the whole world hooked on Maigret.

Not only did Maigret sell by the million in every tongue and in all media, literary critics praised his author’s stripped-down style. Though it could be said that the style was
stripped-down because Simenon was essentially styleless – he
said
he spent hours taking out the adjectives, but he also said he was irresistible to women – nevertheless he
acquired such prestige for Maigret that his action novels without Maigret in them started counting as proper novels, the absence of the star turn being thought of as a sign of artistic purity.

Seriousness is a tag that most genre writers can be counted on to covet, even when they have made a good fist of seeming to despise it. Soon a new, specially commissioned novel by the Edinburgh
author Ian Rankin will be serialised in the
New York Times
, a prospect which has already attracted attention in the upmarket British press, as when the occasional British astronaut is
deputed by NASA to do the blindfolded bean-counting experiment in Earth orbit. But apparently Rankin’s famous Inspector Rebus won’t be in the story.

Interviewed by the London
Independent
about this startling act of self-abnegation, Rankin sounded the way Fred Astaire once did when he suggested that his forthcoming appearance in
On
the Beach
would be a heaven-sent opportunity not to dance. For Rankin’s fans all over the world, Rebus is the ideal sleuth: a maverick (of course) cop who drinks so hard that he gets
another hangover from inhaling his current hangover, he keeps his job only by the kind of deductive brain that can operate even when bombed. In Britain he is played on television by Ken Stott, with
a magnificently burred accent and a rack of luggage beneath each eye.

Looking and sounding like a man who has slept under a reclining horse, Rebus will be a big absence from this new story. But the new story will still be set in Edinburgh, which has the advantage,
even as it becomes more prosperous, of offering, along with plenty of well-preserved classical architecture, an infinite number of equally well-preserved dank staircases leading down into squalid
areas where Rankin’s reeking hero can find bodies in even worse condition than his own. Other Scots detectives get to operate in the less ambiguous setting of Glasgow, where far fewer
classical outlines have survived to frame the rough stuff. To indicate that they are not pampered, the actors who play the Glasgow flatfeet on television say ‘murghder’ instead of
‘murder’. With throats that hurt from the accent, and teeth chipped from being gritted, Glasgow tecs are tougher. But Edinburgh
looks
better, a fact bearing implications to which
we might return.

Most lone detectives belong to a police force nowadays, because it gives the writer an easier task: in a police station, there are a lot of other personnel for the hero to interact with. In the
days when the lone detective was alone, he interacted mainly with the bottle,
a` la
Philip Marlowe, who had nothing else in the top drawer of his filing cabinet. Even with Marlowe, the
action improved when the regular cops showed up, so that Marlowe could hate them and they could hate him back. A requirement of today’s lone detective is that the police force he serves in is
riven by faction if not corruption. This is where Italy scores heavily. With dozens of differently uniformed Italian police forces jostling for position to get on the take, there are plenty of mean
streets available for a man not himself mean to walk down. Also – a factor we should note now in case we need it later – a lot of the Italian streets are lined with attractive old
buildings. Against such an inherently interesting background, the swarming lone detectives are in many cases invented by writers who are not native Italians, but just visiting.

My younger daughter, an expert on crime fiction, was the one who tipped me off that the Italian maverick cop who really counted was Inspector Brunetti, created by Donna Leon. Inspector Brunetti
operates in Venice. Donna Leon, however, is not Venetian, or even Italian. She might have lived in Venice for twenty years, but she benefits mightily from the outsider’s traditional love of
the Serenissima. Donna Leon is an American, and although the Brunetti novels are bestsellers in many languages, she has so far not allowed their translation into Italian. Thus her fans are either
non-Italians or else Italians who read foreign languages. It seems a fair guess that the factor uniting them all is a sad involvement with Venice. In every fan’s first-pick Brunetti novel,
Acqua Alta
, she gives intimate details of the decaying city while never delaying the action for a moment. Hers is an unusually potent cocktail of atmosphere and event. People get addicted.
There will be another Donna Leon out imminently, but meanwhile, in our house, everyone is lining up to read the last one.

Always vowing to give up soon, by now I have read at least half a dozen Brunetti novels and have got well past the stage of remembering what happens in which book, even though the author, for
the length of time it takes to read the text, is pretty good at not letting background detail overwhelm foreground action. You always know which canal the body is in, but the inspector never takes
his eye off the way it has been lashed to the piling. (‘Although the fish and crabs had been at her during the high water of September, he knew it must be the Englishwoman, Kate Croy . .
.’) Inspector Brunetti is happily married and eats well, the way Maigret used to when Madame Maigret fixed his lunch. Usually, in this sort of book, the sleuth is divorced, eating badly off a
snatched sandwich, and drinking hard, especially if he is Irish. But Inspector Brunetti can’t wait to get home to his hot wife and her subtle tricks with the calamari. He is kept on the case,
however, by crimes of rare intricacy that would take time to solve even if he were not frustrated all the way by an incompetent senior officer. Meanwhile the beautiful city sinks slowly but
irretrievably into a sea of corruption. Down these means streets a man must row who is not himself mean.

Another of the vast crowd of Italian lone detectives, Inspector Zen, is also the creation of a non-Italian, Michael Dibdin: based in Seattle, background in England and Northern Ireland. Typical
among Dibdin’s several Zen novels,
Vendetta
reveals that Dibdin commands a precisely literate prose. He knows what it means to ‘eke out’, for example. But he doesn’t
know that the action would move faster if Inspector Zen didn’t take what feels like a hundred pages to get across Rome, mentally noting every detail, as if he were a writer. Since Zen is
nominally functioning in the Criminalpol section of the Ministry of the Interior, and is already unpopular with his superiors for being too honest – no wonder he’s divorced – this
tendency to annotate the atmosphere can only hurt his image. The disadvantage of an author’s being a
straniero
is thereby starkly revealed. Non-Italians find Italy too fascinating.
There is thus room for the homegrown writer to score on the level of economical evocation.

Featuring prominently in this department is Andrea Camilleri, inventor of the Inspector Montalbano mysteries, which in Italy are put out in an elegant series of paperbacks that any sophisticated
family likes to have a couple of neatly displayed on the glass-topped coffee table. Montalbano’s bailiwick is Sicily. If mainland Italy is corrupt, Sicily is corrupter, and Montalbano has
some plenty-mean streets to walk down. He does so at a brisk pace, and it is because Camilleri knows his background too well to be impressed. He speaks the language. Camilleri’s regular
translator Stephen Sartarelli has made a well-deserved career out of rendering Montalbano’s Sicilian dialect first into Italian, then into English, and then into your living room, where you
can back it up, if you like, with subtitled DVDs, because Montalbano is an all-media phenomenon in his land of origin.

A typical Montalbano novel, and one which I recommend heavily for when you can spare a couple of sunlit afternoons from
The Wings of the Dove
, is the impeccably grimy
The Shape of
Water
. Hookers, junkies, scary crime, inspired sleuthing, great sexual tension between the happily fixed-up Montalbano and the vampy young female cop Corporal Anna Ferrara. Notable is the way
Camilleri can do a character’s whole back-story in half a paragraph, and only rarely do you get that giveaway trade trick by which one character tells another what he already knows, so that
you can find out. ‘You know what he’s like,’ says A to B about C, and then proceeds to tell B what C is like, as if B didn’t know after all. But at least Camilleri is aware
that these technical requirements exist, and that it really is a lot easier all round to depict the character outright, rather that plant him in front of a mirror and give him Rembrandt’s
ability to depict himself.

That last habit is one of the sure signs of the beginner in genre writing. Italy’s most recent home-grown crime-fiction wonder boy, Massimo Carlotto, hasn’t got even that far yet.
But unlike most crime writers, Carlotto has a criminal record, which gives him a flying start with the street cred. In the days of the Red Brigades, he was rounded up in an anti-terror sweep and
did time in gaol before being sprung into a life of writing. If only he wrote better. Another dozen novels and he might, but it could be a case of congenital ineptitude that no amount of experience
will cure.

Carlotto’s latest hit,
The Master of Knots
, is a story of torture, snuff movies and arbitrary death that once again features his freelance fighter for justice, nicknamed the
Alligator. The Alligator drinks Calvados the way the Scots and Irish boys drink whisky, but unlike them, and like most of the other Italian sleuths, he lines his stomach with decent food, evoked in
some detail. His friend Max is a cook. ‘Max had prepared linguini with a cream sauce containing prawns and aubergines.’ Philip Marlowe never ate anything like that. On the other hand,
Philip Marlowe never had to listen to anything like the following, which might just possibly sound better in the original Italian, although I wouldn’t count on it. ‘“We’ve
absolutely got to find a way of stopping the Master of Knots and his gang,” Max said angrily.’ Those are the moments that make real writers wonder if they shouldn’t get into the
crime-fiction business and run up a score.

The temptation is as old as the discovery that any real writer can use a cash cow. The British poet C. Day Lewis was once the crime novelist Nicholas Blake, and for a while Julian Barnes was Dan
Kavanagh, whose bi-sexual private eye Duffy patrolled Soho in search of loose change. All over Europe and all through modern history, there have been real writers sending out a sleuth on the same
mission. John Banville is the latest to fall for the lure. Banville has adopted the pseudonym Benjamin Black in order to produce a crime novel called
Christine Falls
, starring a pathologist
called Quirke.