cambridge-crime-fiction

david glover
of fantasy scenarios in which his characters try out actions and identities,
intensifying the rhythms of suspense and, at the same time, connecting up
with the reader’s own fantasy investment in his narratives. Yet though this
lends sharpness and humour to his writing, it adds much less psychological
depth than one might expect. For all the exactness of Leonard’s wary,
hard-nosed street talk and tacky urban realism, there is hardly any detailed
exploration of motive here, and scant regard for origins. Much the same is
true of other, very different writers. Patricia Highsmith has noted that, while
her ‘criminal heroes’ are ‘psychopathic or neurotic’, they are also ‘fairly
likable, or at least not repugnant’. 47 Her most successful creation, the murderer
Tom Ripley, is however something of a mystery man. We learn very
little about his past, apart from a brief glimpse of his difficult childhood with
the contemptuous Aunt Dottie who brought him up. Instead, Highsmith describes
the way in which Ripley is flooded by feelings of hurt and humiliation
that feed his paranoia, ‘swelling’ into a ‘crazy emotion of hate, of affection,
of impatience and frustration’ that impedes his breathing. 48 But these sudden
intensities are quickly absorbed into Highsmith’s impassive, deceptively
transparent prose in which characters and events turn out to be far more
elusive than they appear at first sight. Mundane occurrences can slide imperceptibly
and irretrievably out of control, producing a fiction of nagging
indirection in which we are made to feel that ‘surveillance and introspection’
come down to ‘the same thing’. 49
Highsmith is one of the very few women writers to make the world of the
thriller her own and her work is a reminder of just how closed to outsiders
that world has been. While there are now lesbian, Hispanic and many other
variants of the hardboiled private eye, for example, the mainstream thriller
has remained largely immune from such developments and the genre has
attracted relatively few minority writers. So it is appropriate to close with
two recent texts that seem less comfortable with the thriller’s sexual premises
and that have tried to tackle its blind-spots head on. Susanna Moore’s controversial
In the Cut (1995) starts from a woman’s fixation upon male argot
and male power, embedding it within the growing panic that a serial killer
brings to her downtown New York neighbourhood. Part confession, part
investigation, In the Cut records a teacher of creative writing’s search for a
working knowledge of the precinct that polices and gives shape to her desires,
itemising the strange equivalences that resonate throughout street slang –
in which ‘to lash’ is ‘to urinate’ and ‘gangsters’ are a woman’s breasts – until
she comes to a point where an official interrogation turns into intercourse
and the phrase ‘Give it up’ is no longer a demand for information but has become
an explicit sexual command. 50 The woman’s narration is as dangerous
and doomed as anything in Jim Thompson, but it is the delicate anatomical
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