Yon Banville’s A Miserable Old – Sssh, He’s Here

Further to the crime fic / lit fic debate of last week, in which it was argued that John Banville (right) demeans crime writing and its writers by admitting that he writes quicker as Benjamin Black than John Banville, the man himself had a right-to-reply piece in The Guardian yesterday. To wit:

“A sheep should not venture into a pen of wolves. Not the least of the reasons I agreed to attend the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing festival 2009 in Harrogate was that the name charmed me. Also it was a chance to revisit Yorkshire, a part of the world I greatly like, if only for the rough poetry of the common speech there - for instance, on the train from Leeds to Harrogate a woman in the seat behind me was speaking of a fickle friend and said: "She coomes on lak a dyin' swan and then puffs oop."
  “My event was a public interview with Mark Lawson, an expert conductor of the third degree; also on stage was that fine writer Reginald Hill. We had a large and attentive audience, consisting mostly of fans of Reg, I suspect. During the hour-long conversation I described my differing work methods as John Banville and Benjamin Black, saying how the former writes painfully slowly while the latter is fluent and fast. I am told that many in the audience took offence at this, imagining, I presume, that I was making a disparaging comparison between my "literary" books and my crime fiction. I also made a joke - limp, I admit - to the effect that I fully expected Black to win the Nobel prize; this has been blogged as my saying that I expected to win it. Imagine a weary sigh.
  “Another blogger did a survey among attendees. One of them, Ruth Dudley Edwards, a good writer who should have known better, allowed herself to be quoted as saying that I was slumming it as Benjamin Black. The inevitable implication of this is that Dudley Edwards considers crime writers to be slum dwellers. I prefer to think of Benjamin B. as lording it among aristocrats such as Georges Simenon, James M Cain, and my much-missed friend, the lavishly talented, late Donald Westlake, aka Richard Stark.
  “I deplore the apartheid that has been imposed on fiction writing, so that in shops the "crime books" are segregated from the "proper" novels. Of course, there are bad crime novels, many of which seem to have been written with the blunt end of a burnt stick, but the same is true of so-called literary fiction. The distinction between good writing and bad is the only one worth making. I revel in the challenge of crafting my crime books, trying to make something new in an old convention - for is that not what any artist does? Baa.”

  Well said, that man. “I prefer to think of Benjamin B. as lording it among aristocrats …” Nice.
  As for Ruth Dudley Edwards and the ‘slumming it’ bit, and on the basis that she wasn’t being ironic, or quoted out of context – what’s so wrong with the idea that John Banville is slumming it as Benjamin Black? I find the idea that Banville is writing from an ivory tower and Benny Blanco in a tenement slum very appealing, actually; it puts me in mind of Chandler’s take on Hammett, that he took murder out of the drawing room and dropped it back in the alley, where it belonged. To me the crime novel – and I make the distinction between crime novel and mystery novel, or thriller – belongs in the slums, its sewers thronged with rats made mad by poverty and poisons and doomed to drown, sooner or later, in the endless flow of shit.
  A very broad generalisation, I know, and it very probably says more about me than I’m willing to examine too closely that that’s not only my idea of a good time, but a metaphor for life itself and the universe at large.
  John Banville says he’s not slumming it, and good enough for me. In the long run, though, it’s a moot point. He’ll be judged by the books, not on his attitude or what he did or didn’t say. And it’d be a shame if some kind of inverted snobbery were to deny him a fair hearing.

John Banville’s THE INFINITIES is published on September 4.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: WHAT BURNS WITHIN by Sandra Ruttan

What burns within WHAT BURNS WITHIN is Sandra Ruttan. There is, among the six or seven sub-plots, a story about arson, and the title could also refer to personal hells, but what really burns, with a cold intensity, is Ruttan’s seriousness, the clarity of her intent, the laser-like precision she brings to the process of saying that the truth is subjective and the universe is pitilessly indifferent, so let’s roll up our sleeves and do something about it.
  The characters who roll up their sleeves here are RCMP officers Craig, Tain and Ashlyn, who begin the story investigating child abductions and potentially related arsons and rape cases in the Vancouver area. The trio’s complex history is explored as the three main stories weave together, although Ruttan is clever enough to use this material to propel the story forwards rather than rely on flashbacks and digressions that might slow the scintillating pace.
  Short and snappy chapters, terse dialogue, staccato delivery of minimalist description – Ruttan’s style harks back to the classic hardboiled era, although she’s more Horace McCoy than James M. Cain or Dashiell Hammet. McCoy, like Jim Thompson, always had bigger fish to fry, and told more than tales rooted in criminality. As with Thompson, and Ruttan, McCoy was fascinated by conflict, its roots and possible resolutions, and particularly the conflicts of the mind (WHAT BURNS WITHIN also engages with notions of justice and forgiveness, religious extremism and secular self-sacrifice, damaged sexuality and the abuse of power). And yet Ruttan is very much a shower rather than a teller: there are very few internal monologues to be heard in WHAT BURNS WITHIN, the subtleties of the characters’ complex psychologies being drawn out through their interactions with their colleagues. That’s a difficult skill to make invisible, but it’s one of Ruttan’s most effective weapons.
  It’s a war out there. Writers wage war on the credibility of the reader with every weapon they have, and most crime writers do so by having their characters go into battle in a quixotic, unwinnable war against criminality. Sandra Ruttan has gone to war under a banner of honesty, bringing an integrity to the genre that results in a bleakly depicted but ultimately compassionate, fascinating and meticulously researched police procedural that dares to say that we – as a community, city, society or culture – are entitled to believe we can become better people. – Declan Burke

(A Minister for Propaganda Elf writes: The Grand Vizier would like it to be known that Sandra Ruttan has previously reviewed THE BIG O, thus raising issues of log-rolling and mutual back-scratching, most of which are discussed at length here.)