What Book to Read?

Recently I was looking for a good thriller, so I checked out the Guardian 2012 ten best crime stories. (Why not 2013? The 2012 ones are more likely to be available from a library. You don’t think I buy all of these books, do you?) Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, which I reviewed recently, was top of the list. Of the others, I thought Cathi Unsworth’s Weirdo looked interesting. But taking my own advice, I decided to start with her first book, The Not Knowing (2005), though in fact I need not have, since all four of her novels are stand-alone.

The story begins with a clearly psychotic murderer leaving the scene of his crime, but moves quickly to the narrator, Diana Kemp, who describes herself as ‘a journalist on the make’. She works for an edgy new magazine called Lux, which covers all of the trendy cultural currents that were new in 1992, when the story is set – ‘comics and deviant film making … crime-writing and rock’n’roll’. She is preparing to attend a crime writers’ festival specialising in the ‘nouveau noir’. Her boss, Neil, is big on ‘the role of the degenerate in overthrowing the establishment’; he has just done an interview for the magazine with Jon Jackson, maker of a highly successful gangster film. But why has Jackson now disappeared? The story crosses at times to the murderer – initially unnamed – and it is left to the reader to work out that his story is happening a bit before Diana’s – though of course they soon intersect.

One character notes that most crime stories are about either how clever the detective is, or how cunning the criminal, whereas ‘no one ever writes about what it’s like for the victims.’ That’s a good point, but it’s not an intimation of what Unsworth is doing here. This is a crime story – but not from the victim’s perspective. Nor is it a detective story. I usually prefer not to reveal anything about how the story unfolds, but in trying to understand the book’s strengths and weaknesses, I’m saying a bit more than usual. The police are involved, and do finally identify the criminal, but the reader is never told how. And Diana is not the ‘ordinary person’ who solves the mystery; the puzzle, in so far as there is one, is worked out through events. But there are clues. What is it about his interview with Jackson that Neil is hiding from Diana? There’s some quite clever misdirection going on here, but the plot feels like it hasn’t quite gelled. Or maybe I’m missing something.

What Unsworth does well is suspense, created when the reader knows more than the narrator. You want to shout to Diana ‘look behind you!’ but of course she never does.

Another of Unsworth’s strengths is her ability to create the part exciting, part sleazy cutting edge of film and music ‘noir’ culture – the pubs and clubs, the markets, the mix of aficionados and fans and wannabes, the films and bands, most of which I’ve never heard of. (For example I had to look up what psychobilly was.) Diana is fully a part of this scene; sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll are an integral part of her life. This no doubt makes her an authentic character – though perhaps not one all readers will warm to.

This brings me to the main question I have about the book. It isn’t just about ‘nouveau noir’ culture; it sets out to be an example of it. The excerpt from the book of one of the writers she meets at the crime writers’ festival is very nasty – but highly acclaimed. (The book in the story is called ‘Weirdo’, which is the name of Unsworth’s most recent novel.) There are several very unpleasant scenes, and one that I skipped over altogether because it was clear what sort of violence was coming. In a story about a psychopathic killer, there is bound to be a lot of violence, and the sorts of crimes described are horrendous. The very first lines of the book – ‘The moon was in the gutter … Reflected in the sky’ set the tone. But is it simply pastiche, contrived for effect? I’m just not sure.

There’s a minor theme about censorship running through the book, and at one point, Diana asks the writer of Weirdo about how he sees the violence he describes. ‘There seems to be a lot of empathy in your book,’ she says. ‘A lot of compassion … It wouldn’t be so powerful if there wasn’t that feeling there … It would be a gratuitous pornography of violence.’  Well yes. Are we sure it isn’t anyway?

You can read more about Cathi Unsworth here.