The Not So Simple Art of Murder

I'm reposting this from June of 2009 as what I said then is more relevant today. This year (2013) New York has experienced the lowest murder rate since reliable records began in 1963 and last week there wasn't a single murder in any of the five boroughs. The number of white murder victims in Manhattan this year appears to be fewer than half a dozen. White Manhattanites are thus living in the safest large Metropolitan area in the world (safer even than London) although you wouldnt know that from the TV. Anyway here's what I said back in 2009. I've corrected the data for the latest available year (2011):
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The New York Times has published an interactive murder map of New York City which incorporates comprehensive NYPD data for the last eight years. The map is interactive because you can filter it by race/age/location etc. It makes for some interesting reading. I always thought it was amusing when I lived in Oxford that Inspector Morse stumbled across a murder every week when there hadn't been an actual murder in the city of dreaming spires in eight years. New York's plummeting murder rate has generated a similar dissonance. If you add up all the deaths on Law & Order, L&O SVU, CSI-NY etc. etc. there are easily 100+ murders in Manhattan every season and because most of the writers are white - and that's the demographic they skew to - most of the TV victims are also white. And this is where the dissonance comes in. If you look at the actual data around 92 percent of all murder victims in New York City are black or Latino. In Manhattan in 2011 27 people were murdered, four of whom were white. You heard me right. Four. (Although I am red/green colour blind so you might want to check that interactive chart for yourself.) Yes this is four people too many people and of course it still represents four tragedies but that's not my point. By several orders of magnitude there are going to be many more white Manhattanite crime victims on network TV, movies and in crime novels this year than actually died in real life. I reckon ten times as many white people will be killed on the Law & Order franchises alone than in the real world. Why is this? Well murder sells of course and as a crime novelist I don't want to put a stop to that but why can't the networks tell us the real story that emerges from the NYT interactive map? The real victims of crime in New York are black and Latino and they live in places like Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, Bed Sty. Places where the actors, execs and writers never go. Maybe the studios are worried that those stories wouldn't play in Iowa. Well the success of The Wire proves that realistic crime dramas can work, but it's not easy, you can't just give people formula, you've got to write intelligent believable characters; in short the writers would have to exercise that big muscle between their ears and the networks would have to stop playing it safe. Would Inspector Morse have been as successful a show if he had gone after bicycle thieves and cocaine dealers? Maybe. Maybe not. But I think a little dose of reality might have been fun once in a while. Similarly with TV, films and crime fiction. Perhaps they could at least make an occasional attempt to show the reality of murder in New York. It's a reality that mostly exists across 110th Street way beyond the comfort zone of most of the creative types, who if truth be told probably all live in Santa Monica anyway.

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The Swimmer As Hero

(a post from the blog's infancy)
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I had never heard of Charles Sprawson's Haunts of the Black Masseur - The Swimmer as Hero until I read a review of the book by JG Ballard in an essay collection. Ballard endorsed it so strongly that I ordered it immediately from Amazon.com. It is a cultural and literary history of swimming through the ages, enlived by Mr Sprawson's own swimming exploits: learning to swim as a boy in India, bathing at Pliny's house in Como, dodging Russian tankers as he attempts the Hellespont, lounging in the pools of Hollywood. Sprawson is one of those people who have read everything and he must have dozens of notebooks full of swimming references which he generously doles out for our amusement in lovely, streamlined prose. Byron gets his own chapter as do the Romans, Greeks and German romantics and many likely and unlikely figures in between. The book is charmingly illustrated and bound. It would be flawless but for the fact that it lacks an index. Though published by the small University of Minnesota Press it has been continually in print since 1993; so I would urge U Minn to hire an indexer for the next printing and if they don't Mr Sprawson should jump to Penguin or NYRB who would, I'm sure, love to have him on their lists. Charles Sprawson's interview with the BBC is miraculously still available here.

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Hail To Thee Backstroker!

a post from 4 years ago about a problem I still have to this very day...
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Last year I read a book called The Swimmer As Hero and since finishing it, I've tootled along, three days a week, to swim at the charming St Kilda Sea Baths just down the road from my house. The building is attractive, the staff helpful, the water buoyant. The number of hairy, obese Russian men is higher than I would have thought strictly necessary but the Russian guys are mostly there to argue with one another in the hot tub so they dont really bother me. I generally swim in the slow lane because you never see those nutters who do the turny flips and you seldom feel the pressure of people behind you (one of the reasons I gave up golf).
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It's lovely and except when St Kilda FC comes by to show off their impressive physiques my only menace is the backstroker. Ah, the backstroker - I am fascinated by these bold adventurers who choose that odd method of locomotion in a small community pool. When I'm doing the crawl or the breastroke I'm very careful about keeping to the left hand side of the lane lest I touch someone or disturb anyone with my arm motion. Backstrokers however are a different breed. Like Polynesian canoeists they launch themselves into the unknown without map or compass, caring naught for anything but their own progression down the 25 metres of the pool. I couldn't go 2 metres without worrying that I was about to bump into something or that my leg kick was splashing in some poor devil's face. The rugged individuals of the backstroke fraternity (actually mostly sorority) have however obviously read and digested their Ayn Rand. Ayn didn't show mercy and neither do her acolytes. Regardless of your lane they will kick you, slap you, sideswipe you, kick you again - sometimes it's like an aquatic Three Stooges out there. While everyone else is looking forward at their fellow man, buying into the notion that Friedrich Hayek was wrong and that there is such a thing as a society, the backstroker is off in her own realm, staring at the ceiling and only vaguely aware that other human beings are in the pool or indeed that they exist at all. This impresses me no end. We need backstrokers in our civilization: we need them up on Mars erecting geodesic domes or digging wells in Africa or exploring jungles looking for new medicines.
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We maybe even need them in the St Kilda Sea Baths to show us how to live. This afternoon when I was at the end of a lap, a large man with a magnificent swathe of back hair was trying to climb up the ladder thus blocking the lane to my immediate left; coming towards me in a gold swim hat was a backstroker. She couldn't see me of course so I was trapped between a rock and a hard place. Or more accurately between a hairy, wet buffalo-like hide of back hair and an Ayn Rand torpedo. Naturally I got the worst of all possible worlds. She crashed into me and the hairy guy and he fell backwards onto both of us. Flustered I got out and huffed for a second and moved to the Medium Lane. She, what did she do? She just grunted, turned around and carried on backstroking as if nothing had happened. "The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me," as that fruitcake Ayn Rand would have said. 

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"The Clash Would Have Killed To Have Come From Derry" - A History Of The Undertones

Recent fantastic BBC 4 documentary on the greatest Irish band there's ever been: The Undertones. Working class kids who conquered the charts by crafting perfect 3 minute teen-angst punk pop songs in the middle of what could, with some justification, be described as a war zone...

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Why Reality Shows Are Good For Us

In 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the following letter to Scribner's complaining about the fame he had achieved, compared to the fame of his engineer father and grandfather: "I might write books until 1900 and not serve humanity so well and it moves me to a certain impatience to see the little frothy bubble that attends [me] and compare it with the obscurity in which the better man finds his reward."
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It's always a mistake to try to compare oneself with one's father. My grandfather was a carpenter who could have built a house, my father (right) was a fitter, welder and ship's engineer who could have wired and plumbed a house. I am challenged to change a lightbulb without electrocuting myself. But I take Stevenson's deeper point: how come the writer of silly stories gets the attention whereas the engineer gets none. When my father worked for Harland and Wolff he built ships. Ships! He and his mates went into work every day and at the end of six months there was a great big ship sitting there in the dry dock. Robert Louis Stevenson's grandfather built lighthouses all over Scotland that saved thousands of lives and it annoyed him that his grandfather had slipped into obscurity whereas he got fan mail from all over the world.
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The very first prose narratives that have come down to us - Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Tain etc. - were the stories of the ruling elites: kings, emperors and their cronies and foes. Even the sprightly tale of a blue collar carpenter’s son from Nazareth veers into monarchial territory when we discover at the denouement that he’s actually the Son of God. Some Greek and Roman plays and stories have working people and slaves in them but usually as comic foils or fools. It’s not until the realist writers of the nineteenth century that we begin to see ordinary people getting more than a cameo appearance in the written works of the culture. In early Dickens there’s usually a bit of magic that happens to rise the orphan child out of the gutter and reveal him as an aristocrat but in later Dickens books he had the courage of his convictions to stay the magic wand and let his working class character live lives that were in the phrase of Thomas Hobbes: ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ Some middle and upper class critics however couldn’t bear to read these tales of woe, Oscar Wilde famously epigrammed that “only a man with a heart of stone could failed to have laughed at the death of Little Nell.”
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In the early twentieth century the exploration of working class lives was an increasingly popular genre – Jack London’s People of the Abyss caused a sensation when it appeared and nearly three decades later George Orwell’s Road To Wigan Pier caused a similar sensation when Orwell showed that very little had improved for those at the bottom of heap. The advent of the cheap paperback book allowed an increasing diversity of voices and authors appeared who documented the lives of the working poor (and the downright indigent) from within. The decades following the Second World War were, perhaps, a Golden Age for literature of the proletariat as the GI Bill in America induced many men (and women) to go to college. In Britain too there were new universities springing up all over in the 1950’s in such places as Birmingham, Hull and Coventry.
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But with the growth of television reading books for pleasure began to decline again and by the 1990’s reading novels had almost become a weird cult-like activity of the middle classes. The upper classes and the lower classes rarely read novels and so fiction began to reflect the desires and needs of the suburban middle. After its initial “educate and inform” phase TV began to pitch itself at the working classes quite early on but the crucial thing about these first soap operas and kitchen sink dramas was the fact that they were written by middle class college kids who saw that kind of writing as a stepping stone to the movies or a proper literary career. Working class soap operas such as Eastenders and Coronation Street have been the most popular scripted shows in Britain for the last 25 years but the writers of these shows are usually upper middle class kids and I'll bet their dream is to get to work on a posh show about murders in Oxford or spies in Cambridge. There is a filter between reality and fiction and that filter goes through the brain of people who don't come from the class they're making the programme about. In Britain 6% of the population went to private school but they dominate the media and the culture and its essentially their vision that we read in the papers, or in novels or in scripted dramas.
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But there is an alternative to all these posh boy scripts and that alternative is the plethora of reality shows that dominate the lower (and increasingly upper) channels of your TV remote. It's on reality shows that we get the stories of fishermen and mechanics and lobstermen and builders and duck hunters and carpenters and the toilers at dirty jobs and yes alas also rich housewives. (Of course these stories are edited and shaped by others, but still...) If a TV camera followed me around for a week there would be nothing of interest to put on the box, but if it had followed my dad around while he was working as a welder and boilermaker in the shipyard there would have been great stuff. Or better yet when he was working as a ship's engineer on BP tankers in the early 1960's, getting heckled by Nasser's men going through the Suez canal, experiencing Jim Crow in Texas City, dealing with a boiler room fire in the Indian Ocean, etc. And my little brother (above)'s story would make good TV too: he's a Royal Navy intelligence officer who speaks Farsi and who served in Iraq and Afghanistan for crying out loud.
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I am NOT comparing myself with the incomparable Robert Louis Stevenson (I wouldn't dream of it as Kidnapped is one of my top 10 books of all time) but I agree with RLS when he complains that his life is boring and shouldn't be celebrated whereas the life of his father and grandfather would have made a great drama. Celebrities are dull and authors are dull but reality shows, especially those on the Discovery and National Geographic networks, give previously unheralded people a chance to show how smart, funny and interesting they really are. RLS, I think, would have totally approved.

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Red or Dead

my review (below) of David Peace's Red or Dead in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age. It was a difficult review to write as I absolutely loved the book but I felt that I had to warn the casual reader and/or Liverpool fan that this was written in Peace's rather unique style which might, er, drive some people up the wall. Anyway this is what I came up with: 
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Clough and Shankly

In an early scene in David Peace’s new novel, Red or Dead, the Liverpool Football Club players are anxiously waiting to meet their new manager, Bill Shankly. It is December 1959 and the club has been scuffing along in the Second Division for five years. Morale is at rock bottom, the Anfield ground is literally falling apart, and Liverpool hasn’t won anything for a generation. Shankly is a working class lowland Scot who has gained a reputation as a hard taskmaster. Stories begin to circulate around the dressing room about Shankly’s psychological acumen, his tactical genius and his knowledge of football lore:

            “Yeah I heard a story too. When he was manager at Carlisle. They were two down at half time. And they come in the dressing room. And the first thing Shankly does is grab the captain by the throat and he says, Why did you kick off the way you did? And the captain says, Because I lost the toss, Boss. So Shankly says, Well what did you call? And the captain says, Tails. And then Shankly calls him every name under the sun. Every bloody name there is. In front of the whole changing room. And then Shankly says, You never call tails. Everyone knows that. You never call tails!”  

            This was Bill Shankly in a nutshell: obsessed by details, mercurial and ever so slightly crazy. From day one as Liverpool manager Shankly instituted a new fitness regime, he watched what the players ate and drank, banned smoking and concentrated on the simple skills: passing, dribbling, passing again, faster and faster every time. Most of this was unheard of in English football in 1959 and Shankly’s team began to prove their worth. They won the Second Division title, got promoted, won the First Division title and then the FA Cup. They took home silverware in Europe and they won more league championships and FA Cups. The team Bill Shankly built became the greatest football club in the world in the 1970’s – although its period of supreme dominance came after Shankly’s shock retirement in 1974.

            Red or Dead is a thematic sequel to Peace’s previous best selling novel The Damned United which was about Brian Clough’s brief, disastrous tenure as manager of Leeds United. Clough and Shankly were among English football’s most important and influential managers of the post war era and in a few delicious passages in Red or Dead the two men interact and swap stories. In what must have been a libel lawyer’s nightmare Red or Dead also offers us scenes with the still living football legends: Kevin Keegan, Tommy Smith, John Toshack and Emlyn Hughes. There’s also one hilarious scene, which I hope is true, where Shankly and Bob Paisley fake a groin injury to striker Ian St-John. 

            Although there’s plenty of football in it, Red or Dead isn’t just a soccer novel – it’s also an acute psychological portrait of Shankly the man: an introverted extrovert, a loving husband, a mesmeric leader of men who longs for the anonymity of the terraces at the famous Anfield Kop.

            Shankly came from an impoverished Scottish mining village and his steadfast socialism is unpacked in two conversations with Labour leader Sir Harold Wilson; in a dazzling moment Wilson shows Shankly his most prized possession: a photograph of Wilson’s beloved Huddersfield Town signed by Nikita Khrushchev.

            David Peace’s prose style has been much commented on and criticised and it’s probably a good idea to read the beginning 20 pages of Red or Dead first, to see if you can hack it. Peace, who has lived in Japan for many years, has composed Red or Dead as a kind of repetitive Zen chant. Indeed, his method is so unwavering that there are passages in the book where the use of leitmotif and repetition reminded me of Jack Torrance’s manuscript in The Shining. But repetitive chanting is also the language of the football terraces and perhaps what Peace is doing here is giving us a flavour of what it is like to be a Red fan for ninety glorious minutes every Saturday.  

With its technical innovation and remarkable prose it is extraordinary that Red or Dead didn’t make the Booker Prize longlist. Extraordinary though perhaps not surprising:  Peace’s world is working class, northern, socialist and the love of football in Red or Dead is sincere, communitarian and quasi religious – a million miles removed from the sophisticated, ironic, metropolitan stance of, say, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch.

It's possible that Red or Dead may annoy some casual readers but their patience will be rewarded if they can last until the end. Peace isn’t just telling a story in this novel he’s also trying to teach us a new way of telling stories; like Bill Shankly, Peace is an artist determined to drag his chosen profession into exciting terra nova.  

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Sheugh Explained

A little video from my stay in Dover, Tasmania where I was ploughing through the page proofs of In The Morning I'll Be Gone and in between rain, hail and snow taking a few walks in the woods. On coming upon a sheugh I thought I'd answer one of the questions that seemingly always comes up at book readings: 

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