The conventional advice to writers is Write what you know. That doesn’t always work with crime. I’m glad to say I couldn’t follow it for my book, Auld Acquaintance, because I’ve never been trapped on an island with a murderer. But the next best piece of advice I know is Write the kind of book you want to read. And that’s what I did with Auld Acquaintance.
It's good advice for one reason above all: motivation. Even a short novel is a long project, so it takes some sticking to. It’s hard to keep working on something you don’t like. Like it and, just maybe, you’ll want to be at your desk every day slogging it out against the empty page.
There’s another reason this advice comes up so often. Sometimes you have to write what you want to read because you can’t find it out there by someone else. I was after that too. Crime comes in so many flavours, and there are masterly examples of each sub-genre. But certain strains tend to dominate at any one time, and before I started writing, I’d found myself longing for a kind of book that had dropped out of fashion. Not cosy crime exactly, but what you might call hygge crime: the kind of comfort you can only get in a properly dark winter.
On the one hand, there’s crime so cosy it could keep your tea warm. You know how it goes: an elderly but mentally undimmed protagonist (I love Miss Marple, but she has too many heirs), characters with faintly silly names, a Home Counties village, perhaps a celebrity author, often the presence of cats. Crime with the aesthetic of a chocolate box, only there’s a corpse behind the cottage door.
Then there’s the hard stuff, inspired-by-if-not-actually-Scandi-noir. Every detective an alcoholic estranged from their children, every criminal a child molester or human trafficker, every corpse missing a limb or gouged somewhere. And every relationship proved to be hollow: a lie, a sinister fabrication that ultimately only highlights the terrible and universal isolation of humanity. Particularly our detective, whose only friend is a half-empty glass of aquavit.
Although I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of these books, I’ve often put them down with a feeling that something was missing. For me, the peak of crime as a genre is still to be found with the Golden Age novelists writing in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century: Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and their brethren.
What these writers manage beautifully is a balance of elements which have since been separated and concentrated by the workings of the market. The Golden Age writers knew that while true evil does lurk under the sun, when we’re not fighting it we want to drink, dance, eat well and enjoy each other’s company. Their novels manage to communicate both the dark heart of existence, and the trust and affection that still flourish around it – without slipping into either tweeness or bleakness.
Christie is, of course, the reference point for so many cosy crime practitioners, but what inspired me while writing Auld Acquaintance was the way she creates a reassuring rhythm of cocktail parties, country houses, and dressing for dinner only in order to disrupt it. It’s a trick that shows civilisation up not as a lie but a defence mechanism. Her books are simultaneously completely reassuring and genuinely chilling. Think of the sudden swerve into darkness caused by the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl in the apple-bobbing tub at the beginning of Hallowe’en Party – not even one of Christie’s best. She never forgets the price to be paid for the cosiness we like to enjoy.
It is Tey, though, who remains my favourite crime novelist. She is the mistress of the slowly building sense that something’s wrong. Her detective, Alan Grant, has quite a nice life, really: full of friendships and genial colleagues, even if he struggles with the occasional bout of claustrophobia or a broken back. Yet, time and time again, he finds himself preoccupied by a flaw in his surroundings, something that seems minor at first, then shifts and grows, a kink in the mirror reflecting life which soon becomes all he can see. This approach – subtle disquiet developing into obsession – reaches an almost experimental acme in The Daughter of Time, a book in which nothing happens at all. An injured and bed-bound Grant, left with nothing else to do, lies in hospital thinking through the story of Richard III and the murdered Princes in the Tower, and decides that history has enacted a miscarriage of justice. It's gripping and brilliant, without the central character even leaving his bed.
In the end, the best crime novels are good for the same reason Shakespeare is. Even if we see it as entertainment rather than high art, all the best tragedies have comedy mixed into them. Life is not cosy, but nor is it unrelenting in the suffering it causes. Crime is, like life, an ironic genre. That’s what I tried to keep in mind when writing Auld Acquaintance: somewhere there’s a fireside and a jumper worth getting back to, on the other side of all these bodies. If there wasn’t, I for one, wouldn’t want to read it.
Sofia Slater is the debut author of Auld Acquaintance (£12.99, Swift Press)
Should auld acquaintance be forgot. And never brought to mind? Millie Partridge desperately needs a party. So, when her (handsome and charming) ex-colleague Nick invites her to a Hebridean Island for New Year’s Eve, she books her ticket North. But things go wrong the moment the ferry drops her off. The stately home is more down at heel than Downton Abbey. Nick hasn’t arrived yet. And the other revellers? Politely, they aren’t exactly who she would have pictured Nick would be friends with. Worse still, an old acquaintance from Millie’s past has been invited, too. Penny Maybury. Millie and Nick’s old colleague. Somebody Millie would rather have forgotten about. Somebody, in fact, that Millie has been trying very hard to forget. Waking up on New Year’s Eve, Penny is missing. A tragic accident? Or something more sinister? With a storm washing in from the Atlantic, nobody will be able reach the group before they find out. One thing is for sure – they’re going to see in the new year with a bang.
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