What Book to Read?

When I came across Susan Hill as a judge for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, I remembered that she is best known for her ghost stories and her much hyped Mrs De Winter, a sequel to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. More recently she has turned to writing crime stories featuring DCI Simon Serrailler. The Risk of Darkness (2006) is the third in a series of five.

Hill is clear that the Serrailler books are crime novels – but not detective stories. She sees the crime novel as ‘a serious literary genre’, which she believes offers the opportunity for comment on contemporary life. She wants to know ‘not ‘who dunnit’ but much more importantly WHY’.  So her stories are not police procedurals like the ones I wrote about in a recent post; there is relatively little detection, and solving the crime is not the narrative driver of the novel.

There are three major crimes in the story. Only one of them directly involves Serrailler as a policeman: the kidnapping and presumed murder of a young boy. But it is very much the ‘why’ rather than the ‘who’ that concerns Hill, as the reader knows early in the book who dunnit. Two other deaths affect the lives of Serrailler’s family and friends in the cathedral town where he is stationed, though again it is a question of explanation rather than resolution. Further perspectives are given by parents and neighbours of those involved. Unlike in the detective genre, at least some of the action is left open-ended, which is arguably a realistic way of commenting on life.

I identified two major themes in the story that serve to tie together the otherwise rather disparate plot. These are the relationship between crime, mental derangement and evil, and love, its presence and absence, between men and women, and within families. Is the kidnapper mad or bad? Can such a person, apparently wholly self-centred, love another person? Can someone love them? Is it experiences in childhood that shape the urge to violence? How does thwarted love become a motive for violence? And can a deranged mind be said to be driven by ‘motives’ anyway? Some of these questions are implicit, and others are raised by characters in the story, though they are not the sort of questions that can really be answered. Serrailler nevertheless thinks that the crimes ‘seemed linked in some dreadful intangible way, part of a pattern, part of a connection with him and his work and his life’.

Detective stories, whether police procedural or private investigator, stand or fall by how convincingly the crime is set up and then solved. They may comment on contemporary life, but overall they are judged on the strength of the plot. The problem with writing crime novels that depend on psychological insight rather than plot is that they are much harder to pull off. There are great exponents – Crime and Punishment, for example, or at a less elevated level, the work of Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine. Susan Hill writes very competently, but with no exceptional originality or subtly, about these issues. Serrailler is a reasonably complex character (part-time artist, cold in his relationships with women other than his mother and sister, uncertain about where his career is taking him), but I’m not sure what this characterisation adds to the story.  I find some of Hill’s social commentary rather condescending in tone, particularly where she is dealing with her less well-educated characters. And while it is fine to deal at a psychological level, one of the major crimes is not convincingly dealt with at any level.

Given that I’ve said in an earlier post that I’m not overly impressed with the literary capacities of  Stella Rimington, chair of the 2011 Man Booker judging panel, and now not overly impressed with Susan Hill, a member of it, it will be interesting to see what sort of writing they award the prize to.

You can find out more about Susan Hill here. Her most recent Serrailler book is The Shadows in the Street (200?) and Betrayal of Trust will be out in 2011.