The Craft of Writing: Defying Expectations

A familiar pitfall of genre fiction is the temptation of formula. Science fiction, romantic fiction, ghost stories, horror fiction, romantic fiction, all have their formulaic aspects. And so too does crime fiction. Now, there are some excellent stories that stick very closely to a formula, but it is always refreshing to read a story that defies one's expectations.

I was reminded of this when watching The Suspect the other night. There are several films sharing this title -the one I'm talking about dates from last year,and was written and directed by Stuart Connelly. The starting point is a bank robbery, but this is a story very different from Salamander, which I discussed over the week-end, and which also opens with a raid on a bank. Here, the robbery is followed by a quick arrest. Two cops behave unpleasantly towards the suspect, who is black,and for a while the story follows drab and conventional lines. But then the tables are turned.

There are a number of plot twists in The Suspect which I don't want to spoil. Overall, I felt it was an interesting film, with a number of thought-provoking ideas, although some of them didn't seem to me to be handled very smoothly. As a result, the film as a whole felt a bit disjointed, though the final scenes were pretty good. But what I liked about the screenplay was that it was quite ambitious, eschewing formula in favour of an unorthodox plot and some worthwhile observations about how easy it is to stereotype other people..

Because there are a number of well-established formulae for mystery stories, writers can have a good deal of fun subverting reader expectations. Sometimes, the result verges on parody or pastiche - the recent series of Sherlock is an example, taking a classic character and doing something fresh with it. The Evadne Mount books of Gilbert Adair show another way of subverting the genre - something the author does most brilliantly in And Then There Was No One. That book was a sort of homage to Christie, and of course she was particularly daring in the way she defied expectations. Think of whodunit in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express, for instance. Not to mention Murder is Easy, Curtain, and... well, there are plenty of others.

Anthony Berkeley was another Golden Age writer who loved to defy expectations. Even when his experiments were not a complete success, they were invariably interesting. In the modern age, there are plenty of novelists who are very good at changing a story's direction when the reader least expects it - the very talented Andrew Taylor is an example, His Roth Trilogy is quite superb in this respect.

To write a novel that defies reader expectations isn't straightforward, and it's probably not a method to recommend to the inexperienced author. Done well, though, it can provide enormous pleasure for both reader and writer. Anyway, here's a question for you, faithful readers of this blog - what is your favourite example of a crime story that defies expectations?

Andrew Taylor's Diamond Dagger

The public announcement that Andrew Taylor has been awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger came after I'd written my post yesterday about the televised version of his extraordinary Roth Trilogy, but it was the happiest of coincidences.

The Diamond Dagger is awarded for a crime writing career of 'sustained excellence', and nobody can doubt that Andrew's track record demonstrates just that. I've followed his career since its beginnings, with the fascinating and quirky series about William Dougal, and when I became editor of the CWA's anthology, I was delighted when Andrew came up with the first short story featuring Dougal. 'The Cost of Living' appeared in Perfectly Criminal in 1996, and I said in introducing it that the story 'has all the strengths of the Dougal novels: a neat yet unusual story-line, convincing characterisation and that poignancy which is so characteristic of Taylor's writing'.

The same features were evident in his excellent Lydmouth series, and again Andrew honoured me with the first Lydmouth short story, 'The Woman who Loved Elizabeth David', which appeared in Past Crimes in 1998. Several of Andrew's stand-alone novels are quite outstanding. The American Boy won massive sales after it became a Richard and Judy selection, but one of my favourites is the less well-known, but brilliant The Barred Window. And I've mentioned before in this blog that I'm a huge fan of Bleeding Heart Square.

I read Andrew Taylor for pleasure, but in reading the books, I also learn more about the craft of crime fiction from a writer who is not only a consummate professional (a bit of trivia is that, years ago, he wrote a number of tv novelisations under a pseudonym), but whose literary gifts are subtle and original. A star of the genre, who will be a very popular Diamond Dagger winner indeed.

Fallen Angel

I’ve indulged in the DVD of Fallen Angel, the ITV adaptation by Peter Ransley of Andrew Taylor’s Roth Trilogy, and found the three episodes just as gripping as the books on which they were based. Which is saying something, because I really loved the novels, especially the first of them, The Four Last Things

It’s a truly ambitious story, an account in three parts of the development of a sociopathic killer. Rosie, aka Angel, is played in the first two episodes by Emilia Fox, who has surely never had to convey such a chilling character – yet she does so with real conviction. The first story involves the abduction of a young girl, and it turns out that the motive is revenge upon a police officer called Michael, father of the girl. When he was a boy, he revealed the truth about Angel, and a crime she committed, which is at the heart of the second episode, based on The Judgment of Strangers. Dance, a vicar who happens to be Angel’s father, blames himself, but a friend of his late wife reveals that she is, in a sense, responsible for the terrible sequence of tragedies, for reasons revealed in the third and final episode, The Office of the Dead.

Dance is a very good actor, who as David Byfield conveys a mixture of dangerous selfishness and good intentions with real conviction. But I was, if anything, even more impressed by Claire Holman, friend of the family, who plays a vital connecting link between the instalments of the story. Holman was previously known to me mainly from her supporting role as the pathologist in ‘Lewis’, but here I thought she excelled herself. Intensely watchable, very sinister stuff. Strongly recommended.