Wrong ‘uns are right

Fire up the Quatro: Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt, a king of the one-liners and "an anti-hero for our times"

IT USED to be said that if you wanted to understand the nature of a people and its culture all you had to do was take a look at what they were cooking and eating. However, you probably get a much better understanding from what they are reading and watching. That would make Wales a nation of murderers, rapists, extortionists and bank robbers, because what we are reading and watching is crime fiction and drama. By the bloody bucket-load.

According to data firm Nielsen, the biggest selling author last year was Dan Brown, clearly a crime writer masquerading as a conspiracy theorist. In the top 10, you’ll also find James Patterson, John Grisham and the late Stieg Larrsson, whose tattooed heroine, sleuthing her way through a distinctly Ikea-unfriendly Sweden, has captivated readers across the globe and found her way into the cinema.

It’s not just the written word. The biggest television show on the planet is the Crime Scene Investigation franchise. In its original guise, set in Las Vegas, CSI is not strictly a cop show. But in every other respect it sticks entirely within the set framework of crime drama. Its combination of crime committed, evidence gathered, witness interrogated, plot twisted (of the subtle and not so subtle varieties), plus chase and dramatic conclusion, has been a successful formula since Dragnet in the 1960s, through the earnest Streets of San Francisco, the 70s surf glamour of Hawaii Five-O and glamorous yet gritty Starsky & Hutch, to the glorious success and espadrilled excess of Miami Vice in the 1980s. In many ways CSI is a fabulously old fashioned programme albeit with higher production values and more glamorous settings.

Crime drama has clearly become the critics’ darling, too. The argument over ‘he greatest television show of all time’ has vacillated between The Sopranos and The Wire. Neither of these are crime dramas in the traditional sense. Both David Chase (Sopranos) and David Simon (The Wire) have written extensively of how they were looking to challenge the existing paradigms of crime drama on television. Simon, in particular, has written about how The Wire was deliberately designed not to have the classic leitmotifs of likeable protagonist, linear storytelling and satisfactory denouement.

Tellingly, fans of The Wire will often tell you that it is the characters who are the perceived bad guys that are the most sympathetic and compelling to watch while the law enforcement officers often have personal failings that make them difficult not just to like, but to merely engage with, which makes the drama itself so much more rounded, dense and textually rich. It’s still a crime drama, though.

So why do we love this stuff so much? C Day Lewis thought the detective story was a 20th Century folk tale. Nick Elliot, one-time head of drama series at the BBC, believes: “Crime fiction satisfies in us a secret yearning for justice, the unappeasable appetite for a fair world, which begins in childhood and never leaves us. It satisfies our need for conclusions, both moral and narrative.” Before the war, both the detective story and the thriller reassured the middle classes that all would be well: nothing to fear from criminals and lower orders.

Crime drama is designed to entertain. Crime drama and fiction may have literary and higher aesthetic aspirations, and often achieve them, but the emphasis on entertainment ensures that these aspirations do not intimidate potential viewers and readers.

We also use crime drama to reflect and, often, laugh at ourselves. In his Aberystwyth series of novels, Welsh novelist Malcolm Pryce has created a very knowing pastiche of the hardboiled detective. Pryce’s protagonist, Louie Knight, is Humphrey Bogart via Ceredigion. There are constant in-jokes referencing movies and novels. But it’s the black humour and pointed vignettes of a fading West Wales that linger longest. Pryce writes:

“How many other people, honeymooners and young families, had made the same journey as the rain swept in from the sea and pounded on the plywood roof of their shoebox on wheels? Families who had driven for two or three hours, stopping occasionally for puking children, to the world of gorse and marram grass, dunes and bingo and fish and chips.”

This evocative portrayal of holidays past will ring uncomfortably true for many of us, and proof – were it needed – that crime writers can often transcend the limits of the genre in different and often surprising ways.

The most popular example of this must be the Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes shows. The emergence of Gene Hunt, a “man’s man” or “copper’s copper” has resonated in ways previously not envisaged by the show’s creators. What was originally a character to loathe has, thanks to the tremendous acting of Philip Glenister, become an anti-hero for our times. His moral certainty, sense of purpose and penchant for the politically incorrect one liner has made him a household favourite. But it is not simply a sense of nostalgia that Hunt invokes in us. He very cleverly holds up a mirror and says “look at this stuff – wasn’t it completely daft?” and we nod our collective heads in agreement and recognition. Gene knows that life is serious but it doesn’t always have to be.

It has been suggested that its appeal has a psychological dimension, but much of this probably is a simple fascination about what lies beneath. We hear about crime but rarely see it.   We cheer watching the gangsters get away with it.  We’re appalled by their duplicity. We cheer when they get caught. We’re sobered to see that crime doesn’t pay.

The best crime dramas do not suggest a remedy for crime or reassure us that all in the end will be well. But they can help us to understand our society, and they also allow us to hope that evil will not go unpunished. Crime drama fascinates partly because it entertains, partly because it enables us to understand who we are, where we are going and what we could become. Crime drama has the ability to shine a proverbial torchlight into the darker aspects of the world in which we live. We are allowed to stare into the abyss and know that it will not stare back. Don’t have nightmares.