The Murky Depths of Crime Fiction

Crime fiction is a label that covers a huge variety of literary production. Those of us who read so much of it usually have distinct preferences. I’m not so keen on those books, or tele­vision series, that get deeply into post-mortem dissections and dismemberments. I don’t like novels of serial killers or child abuse. I prefer private eyes to police procedure, but I enjoy Colin Dexter’s Morse and Peter Robinson’s Banks and Ann Cleeves’s Vera and Garry Disher’s Challis and Destry series. And Arthur Upfield’s Boney series, even if their police procedures are now deemed to be politically incorrect. But I can also enjoy cosy country house mysteries. And espionage and conspiracy I lap up. In fact, I can read most of it.

Since my topic is crime, let’s deal with the guilt and remorse first. Yes, I admit that I still feel a guilty sense of indulgence about reading so much crime. But then I remind myself that I am not alone. We are not alone, let me assure you. P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, T.S. Eliot, Bertolt Brecht and W.H. Auden were similarly all addicts, if that’s the word. And I suspect it might be. Auden certainly described reading detective fiction as “an addiction like tobacco or alcohol”. Evelyn Waugh was happy to combine addictions, remarking that the advantage of reading crime novels with drink or drugs was that you could read and re-read the books because you never remembered the plots.

I notice that the above were all men. But in accord with gender balance, let me now cite one Australian woman who reads as much as those five men combined. Jean Bedford, herself the author of a number of Australian crime novels, reads six to eight a week. She set up the online magazine the Newtown Review of Books in part to feed her habit with review copies. I recommend it for its crime reviews, and for Peter Corris’s Godfather column that regularly discusses crime fiction.

Crime fiction. Detective fiction. Pulp fiction. Thrillers. Mysteries. The origins and sources of crime fiction are as various as the various titles for the genre. If it is a genre. It overlaps and merges with so many other types of writing. Its sources have been suggested as variously as the biblical Book of Daniel, Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, and the Jacobean Revenge drama, which might seem somewhat remote but you can see the parallels. Instead of a police or private investigator you have someone seeking revenge, like Hamlet, and the plot is resolved by revenge rather than arrest. Then there are the Gothic and historical romances of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century with their mysterious monks and friars coming and going through secret passages and hiding in priests’ holes. Thackeray’s Henry Esmond has such a priest on a secret mission. They provided the model for Cold War spy fiction. Marcus Clarke has such a novel, Chidiock Tichborne, set in sixteenth-century England and featuring one of Walsingham’s secret agents investigating the Babington conspiracy to put the Catholic Mary on the throne. It contains one of the classic lines of later spy fiction: “I do not pay you to think.” And those priests’ holes keep on cropping up in contemporary crime shows like Midsomer Murders and Jonathan Creek.

And then, closer to the form we know today, there are the products of nineteenth-century magazine fiction, and here Edgar Allan Poe is the obvious example. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845) are recognisably the archetypes of classic crime fiction, complete with his detective C. Auguste Dupin. Yet these prototypical crime stories were but part of Poe’s magazine fiction, which included nightmares, fantasies and horror stories. Crime and detection were a subsection of this popular sensational fiction, the emphasis being on the sensational effects it employed and produced.

In Australia in the 1860s and 1870s Marcus Clarke was writing popular magazine stories with this same range of subjects—an opium vision, a nightmare, a mesmeric trance, an adventure amongst savage tribes, and explorations of the occult. “The Doppelganger” is a pioneering murder mystery of the locked room variety, with the traditional clue of detective fiction (the shirt stud rolled into a crack in the floor) but its explanation comes from the realms of the occult. “Human Repetends” is an account of a murder committed “in Padua 400 years ago” that its narrator believes he will re-enact in nineteenth-century Melbourne—here the murderer is known but the crime has yet to be completed. Like priests’ holes, these themes are recurrent. A doppelganger was the theme of Poe’s story “William Wilson” of 1839 and of Peter Corris’s 2010 Cliff Hardy novel, Torn Apart. G.K. Chesterton toyed with the concept of historical re-enactment in his 1922 collection The Man Who Knew Too Much, with the story “The Hole in the Wall”: “It was almost as if they were the ghosts of their own ancestors … and playing some old part that they only half remembered.” And again in the story “The Fool of the Family”: “Sometimes what is happening to me grows vivid in a curious double way, as if it had happened before.” The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was to offer further re-enactments in stories such as his famous “Theme of the Traitor and Hero”.

Crime fiction’s themes and motifs are interwoven with the themes and conventions of other popular fiction—horror, fantasy, adventure. “Sensational Tales” was the title that Clarke’s literary executor, Hamilton Mackinnon, gave to a collection of them that he edited. My former colleague Stephen Knight in his Continent of Mystery, a study of Australian crime fiction, argues that Clarke’s great novel His Natural Life is a work of crime fiction. Well, it opens with a murder and the protagonist is sentenced, unjustly, to transportation. But essentially it is a prison novel, or a novel of the convict system. The crime themes are there, though, including an incorporation of the famous contemporary Tichborne imposture, in which a butcher from Wagga Wagga claimed to be the missing heir to a titled family. My point is that up until the latter part of the nineteenth century crime was one of the strands of popular sensation fiction, but not a major theme standing alone.

With Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White in 1860 and The Moonstone in 1868, and Mrs Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret in 1862, crime and its detection became an organising principle and the genre gradually evolved. In Australia, Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab appeared in Melbourne in 1886, the year before the first appearance of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. And the form itself generated further varieties. It wasn’t long before Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung, after a spell in Australia where he set a couple of novels, took the crime-fighting duo of Holmes and Dr Watson and inverted them into the society jewel thief Raffles and his offsider Bunny. This provided another strand of crime fiction, not unrelated to the rogues’ tales like Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon and Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull and continued in contemporary Australia with Garry Disher’s Wyatt novels.

Once crime fiction had established itself as distinct from the other varieties of sensational fiction, it developed into a number of distinct categories. The basic structural choices for crime fiction now are police procedure, private investigator and independent amateur. There are other variations that can be introduced, of course—like having the narrative presented from the point of view of the murderer; or having different, opposing accounts of the event—something pioneered in that classic Scottish novel, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

The implications of the police procedure model become more apparent in television drama than in books. Once you need to close off streets and iconic tourist spots to record a television drama, you need the co-operation of the police, the local council, the roads and highways authorities and so on. And in order to obtain that co-operation, the scripts have to be submitted to the police, the council and so on to get approval and acceptance.

This involves a complicity with authority. Even if it doesn’t mean that the scripts have to be modified and adjusted, it means that they are going to be written with the need to get that approval in mind. This is a potential problem if the plot is going to involve the questioning of official values and official investigations. It can lead to a disturbing complicity with the ever-expanding reach of big government. It can all too readily be the mouthpiece of the state. Apart from that, the writer needs to know something about police procedure. And in my own case, there was no way I could be persuasive about police procedure. Something best kept away from, I’ve always felt.

You might, indeed, ask what qualifications I had for writing crime fiction at all, since I taught at universities for so many years. But Australian universities have always been a fertile breeding ground for crime. Perhaps there is something particularly nasty about academic life. J.I.M. Stewart, sent out to be a professor in Adelaide just before the Second World War, wrote the first of his Michael Innes crime novels on board ship on the way. Robert Barnard began a prolific crime writing career when he was at the University of New England with Death of an Old Goat, which was set, if not in Armidale, in a regional Australian town extraordinarily like it. And Peter Corris abandoned an academic career for a most successful life of crime with his Cliff Hardy private-eye series, forty-two books in all by the time he published the last of them last year.

I must confess to having ignored the earliest Cliff Hardy novels. Back in 1980, when The Dying Trade appeared, I felt that the genre was concluded. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett had done it all. Ross Macdonald had made a noble effort at revivification, but had turned the 1930s social observations into a depoliticised focus on the family and generational issues. There was nowhere further to go. I was wrong, of course. Robert B. Parker demonstrated there was life in the old formula yet. And when I finally began reading Corris, I realised the rewards were there as strong as ever.

And there was the pleasure of finding familiar settings. I used to enjoy driving along the precipitous coastal road south of Sydney because it reminded me of the settings of so many Hollywood crime movies. It is a setting Corris has used to good effect. But he is probably more closely associated with Bondi and Darlinghurst, Newtown and Glebe, where Cliff’s investigations have led him into an exploration of a unique and characteristic Sydney, in the days before we called such settings iconic. He has captured a particular ambience of both inner city and rich suburban Sydney and made it his own, a familiar, expected and welcome milieu. He has done for Sydney what Raymond Chandler and Robert Crais have done for Los Angeles, Ross Macdonald for Santa Barbara, and Robert B. Parker for Boston. It is easy to underestimate the creative skill here. Yes, those environments exist. The skill lies in evoking what is characteristic, defining, memorable, in the selection and emphasis.

As with another of the great originals, Simenon, Corris’s books are never overwritten. There is none of that endless itemisation and padding increasingly found in the longer tomes of contemporary crime fiction, tedious, obvious and make-weight. The Cliff Hardy novels, like Simenon’s police procedural Maigret series, are readable at a sitting. It is an art in danger of becoming lost, but one that Simenon cultivated. Of course, you don’t have to read the books in one go: you can savour them over two or three days if you are strong-willed.

“Down these mean streets a man must go, who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Raymond Chandler wrote about the private eye. All very chivalrous, as befits someone who gave his detective the evocative name of the Elizabethan playwright Marlowe. Robert Parker similarly named his private eye after another Elizabethan writer, Spenser. Though not everyone was always as enamoured with private investigators. In Armadale, the fulminating Wilkie Collins called the private eye:

the vile creature whom the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There he sat—the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat—the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilization; a man who was in this instance at least, the legitimate and intelligible product of the vocation that employed him; a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through the gimlet-holes in our doors …

Private investigators had developed as a result of changes to the divorce laws, and Collins and his friend Charles Dickens were worried that their irregular private lives and second households might come under investigation and stir up bad publicity.

My novel about dodgy behaviour in the literary world, National Treasure, opens with the protagonist Plant watching someone being systematically beaten up in one such mean street. A classic crime scene. I realised I had my protagonist, even if he was a bit tarnished and somewhat fearful. Having infiltrated his way into the household of a pill-popping novelist, Plant had evolved from research assistant to ghost writer. Now I gave him a business card: Research assistance, investigative reporting. He’s not quite a private eye, not a licensed one, anyway; nor is he quite an amateur. I felt this indeterminate status might be useful—both for his inquiries, and for my writing about him.

Those original great investigators were all private citizens: Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot. They were independent of the state. They represented a private morality that could operate independently of bureaucratic bumbling, political interference and vested interests. Raymond Chandler’s archetypal private eye, Philip Marlowe, is always in a position of questioning the values and actions of City Hall or the police department or the justice system. If a crime involves corruption, then City Hall and the police are likely to be involved or implicated, and they themselves need to come under investigation.

When I taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the place was awash with crime writers. I shared an office with Leonard Tourney, who was writing a series about a couple of sixteenth-century Elizabethan investigators. Leonard introduced me to Dennis Lynds, who under the name of Michael Collins wrote a series about a one-armed detective. He made him one-armed in order to avoid having to include the physical violence aspects of some of the tougher private eyes. But, Dennis told me, in one novel he had forgotten about the disability and had his private eye folding his hands behind his head. Dennis’s wife, Gayle Lynds, collaborated on some of Robert Ludlum’s best-sellers. We all used to meet at the regular writers’ lunches originally set up by that great crime writer Ross Macdonald. In Macdonald’s time, it was said, the lunches had been for men only, so that Macdonald could escape from his wife, the crime writer Margaret Millar.

Private-eye novels are in that tradition of men’s unease about women. Yes, there are cult heroes who bed the blonde. Yet just as often the men are betrayed or humiliated or shot at by womankind. Trouble is my business, said Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. And a lot of that trouble is sourced to women. The world-wearied private-eye tends to be as spry as P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster in trying to avoid female entanglements, whether of fierce dowager aunts or bright young people.

This is the tradition of bachelor literature, the world of the flaneur, the literary dandy strolling those mean streets in pursuit of—well, who knows what Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins were in pursuit of as they strolled through London together? The private-eye novel offers that perspective of investigating the city. Crime is the thread which takes us on an inside view of how the world operates. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime, Balzac wrote. The classic private eye is as familiar with the world of the rich and powerful as with the underbelly. Indeed, they are often concerned to show that it is the same, closely connected world.

And then there is the conspiracy thriller, with political and espionage themes. This is the John Buchan tradition, which Graham Greene and Eric Ambler developed and perfected. Robert Ludlum takes it as far as improbability will allow, and a bit beyond. John le Carré began his career with a crime novel before writing his spy fiction. And his boss at MI6, John Bingham, who encouraged him, wrote both crime and spy novels.

For the novelist a conspiracy is a way of getting a plot. But at the same time it allows that walk through the corridors of power and into the basements of the secret state. Or the lavatory of the Athenaeum, as C.P. Snow put it. An imaginary walk, perhaps even a virtual walk. No one is likely to be letting you in there and letting you out again to write about it. This is where the realist novel confronts problems of data-sourcing. But crime fiction can be more creative. Speculation is what it’s all about, really—that is where the interest lies. The art of the writer consists in making it persuasive.

These political themes are not a necessity for the private-eye novel, of course. When Ross Macdonald developed the private-eye model in the 1950s, his plots tended to revolve round family dramas, psychological issues rather than political. That other prominent innovator of the private-eye novel, Dashiell Hammett, found himself embroiled in the McCarthyite purges of the Cold War and spent time in jail for refusing to name communists he might have known. Macdonald’s focus changed when a major oil spill on the Santa Barbara coast provoked him into writing a novel engaging with corporate greed and environmental disaster.

The private-eye novels of Chandler, Hammett and their successors allowed the possibility of making social critiques, political observations. But equally there was a possibility for the amateur sleuth, free from the bonds of the state or the bonds of being hired. Of course much of the amateur sleuthing is of the cosy variety, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple to M.C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin, and in Australia with Marele Day’s Claudia Valentine and Kerry Greenwood’s Miss Fisher mysteries. But the Father Brown stories of G.K. Chesterton are imbued with social, political and moral themes.

The origin of the Father Brown stories is recounted by Ronald Knox in his essay “Detective Stories”, collected in Literary Distractions:

It happened one day (I am told) that Chesterton had no literary work on hand … and wandered into the office of my literary agent—who was also his—to know if there was any publisher wanting anything done. The reply was “Nothing in your line, I am afraid, Mr Chesterton; in fact the only thing we have heard of lately is the Saturday Evening Post wanting some detective stories.” To which he replied, “Oh, well, I don’t know,” and, sitting down there and then in the office, wrote the first of the Father Brown stories.

Like most professional writers, Chesterton seized any possibility of publication. And he exploited those opportunities to expound his beliefs and ideas, while at the same time being entertaining. And, in the case of the Saturday Evening Post in those days, well paid.

Unlike the earlier, enjoyable television series with Kenneth More, the current series is a travesty of Chesterton’s creation. The first Father Brown story was published in 1911 but the current television series is set in the 1950s for no obvious reason. It is not a very authentic 1950s either—the fields have short-stemmed corn, which was not yet around, and the language regularly slips into twenty-first-century idioms. But most absurd of all, Father Brown is presented as the parish priest of a medieval church in a Cotswold village, something that would not have been the case in England after the sixteenth century.

And then there has been the rewriting in terms of contemporary political correctness. Current crime series on prime-time television now require significant female characters, and so Father Brown is given a couple of female offsiders for every episode. There is nothing comparable in Chesterton’s stories. Nor, in the original stories, do women feature as the criminals. As Ronald Knox pointed out in Literary Distractions, “there is only one female villain in the whole series—it is part of Chesterton’s obstinate chivalry that he hardly ever introduces you to a woman you are meant to dislike”. And Knox offers an explanation of Chesterton’s “so consistently chivalrous an attitude towards the other sex … it is of a piece with Chesterton’s enormous reverence for women, with his knightly devotion, I do not know by what other name to call it, to the holy Mother of God”.

It might be argued that Chesterton could have given women a more prominent role. But he didn’t. His 1904 novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill contains no female characters at all. Whether or not this is deemed to be a fault, the fact is that this was the case. To rewrite Chesterton in the light of contemporary social values is to rewrite history. And when history is rewritten, we have lost the framework from which to view and understand and assess the way we live now. Sometimes the past was worse than now, sometimes better: and we need to be able to understand these differences and their causes, not deny and erase them.

Chesterton was a writer of ideas. The Father Brown stories are diverting and entertaining, but they are also full of thought, of philosophical, political and social issues. The story most often cited is the one in which no one notices the postman, “The Invisible Man”. This is a clever idea about what we observe and what we fail to register because of its familiarity. But it is also and crucially one of Chesterton’s political points about class society—the way in which workers, servants, menials are disregarded, are not even seen. “Nobody ever notices postmen, somehow,” he said thoughtfully; “yet they have passions like other men …” There is a comparable story, “The Queer Feet”, “built on the plain fact that a gentleman’s evening dress is the same as a waiter’s” and so the villain is not detected—“the waiters thought him a gentleman, while the gentlemen thought him a waiter”. Father Brown remarks sardonically: “Yes … it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, do you know, I have sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious to be a waiter.” Other Father Brown stories deal with more theological paradoxes. But the point is that they all have a point—crime fiction as entertainment, but entertainment with a point, entertainment that provokes ideas.

In addition to the five Father Brown collections, there is another group of crime stories by Chesterton that is rarely mentioned. The Man Who Knew Too Much was published in 1922, the year Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church. The man in question, Horne Fisher, is the younger son of a privileged, connected, establishment family. Embedded in the world of politics and the financial corruption underlying the political world, he can see all too clearly what is going on. Chesterton has him solving mysterious crimes. And the point is, these are mysteries of which the solution can never be made public, crimes which can never be published or punished, because the perpetrators are too well connected—they are all senior politicians, high-ranking military, cosmopolitan financiers. The Man Who Knew Too Much is an expression of Chesterton’s appalled awareness of the way we live now:

The Chancellor is in the pocket of the money-lenders, and has to do as he’s told: otherwise he’s a bankrupt and a bad sort of bankruptcy, too, with nothing but cards and actresses behind it. The Prime Minister was in the petrol contract business, and deep in it too. The Foreign Minister is a wreck of drink and drugs …

A hundred years later it is hard to see that anything much has changed.

As writers like John Buchan and Graham Greene, Norman Lewis and Ross Thomas have shown, it is possible to write novels with a strong narrative line that deal challengingly and intelligently with political issues. Morris West was in this category. His novels offer action and suspense. Their plots focus on moral issues and political choices. This was his strength. It gained him a huge, international readership. But it made him uncomfortable to the cultural gatekeepers. He was without doubt Australia’s most successful and most professional mass-market writer. But, unlike so many practitioners in that field, he is at the same time a deeply serious writer. Excellent at narrative pace, his works focus on and engage with significant social and political events. Most of his fiction is set in Italy, the USA and Asia. The Ambassador remains one of the most insightful indictments of US policy in Vietnam, in many ways a better novel than Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

In 1986 Morris West brought his experienced analysis of international crime back home to Sydney with his novel Cassidy. Compared with West’s other best-selling titles, Cassidy has been somewhat neglected. But perhaps not surprisingly.

I realise that I am now treading on dangerous ground. I do not want to inflame that rivalry amongst the Australian states. I am well aware of Matt Condon’s magisterial three volumes based on the Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland. I will leave it to you to decide whether Queensland or New South Wales deserves acclaim as the most corrupt state. It’s certainly a tough competition. And Victoria isn’t out of the running. I simply want to draw attention to Cassidy, West’s disturbing account of New South Wales political corruption.

Charles Parnell Cassidy, a New South Wales Labor premier deeply involved in the rackets, dies in London. Clearing up his estate, his son-in-law finds not only compromising documents about the interface of politics, business, prostitution and gambling, but also a kilogram of heroin. It is the beginning of some amazing revelations. The action moves between England, Australia, the USA and Thailand, and provides all the satisfactions of the political thriller. At the same time it leaves a lot of material for thought about the nature of our society. However, an author’s note proclaims:

This is a work of fiction, a fable and not a history. The characters are figments of the author’s imagination. Those who seek to distinguish real persons under the masks of fictional characters will find themselves astray.

When I told West how much I had enjoyed the novel he shook his head sadly, saying it was a “deformed” work.

“Deformed?” I asked.

In order to avoid action for defamation, he explained.

How much of the truth can ever be revealed, even under the guise of fiction? In the world we live in, can you really write about political crimes? Is it feasible to reveal the hidden corruptions of finance and the state? If you managed to write persuasive, insightful revelations, would you ever be able to get them published? Can the truth ever really emerge?

Crime detection has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century. The development of our contemporary surveillance society has taken crime detection out of the hands of the private eye, unless he or she has good sources of information within the police, highways, financial and medical worlds. The introduction of computerisation, the adoption of digital recording and recognition devices has meant that the first stop in any investigation now is to check the surveillance cameras covering our highways, streets, shopping malls, service stations, sporting venues and everywhere else. Check the suspect’s travel records, whether bus or train card, bridge or road toll, speed cameras, highway cameras. Check the suspects’ and associates’ phone records, e-mail correspondence, internet searches, library borrowings and the rest. It makes writing police procedure a lot easier and private-eye novels a lot harder. But I am not raising all this in order to lament the lot of the private-eye novelist. The lot to lament is our lot, how we have come to live in a society of total surveillance.

You may remember Jeremy Bentham’s proposal for a panopticon, a prison concept adopted at Port Arthur. This was a prison design that allowed one warder to watch into every cell. Of course the warder was not watching every prisoner all of the time. But there was no way of telling whether or not he was watching. The surveillance society works on this model, with highly enhanced technology. And treats us all as if we were already convicted and in jail. Of course your every e-mail sent and internet search made is not being watched. But it is being recorded, and the records are being kept. And if at some later point you become a person of interest to the police, the records can be retrospectively accessed. And this applies to all the digital data about you that is on file—your credit card purchases, your loyalty card and records, travel records, medical consultations, and so on. If you carry a mobile phone your geographical location can be tracked. If the state had ordered us all to wear a tracking device there might have been an outcry. Maybe. But the mobile phone does the job anyway.

It is all alarming and threatening and depressing. So I decided to make the best of it and use it all as one of the themes of a private-eye novel, In the Valley of the Weed. I had been brooding on it all for a while when an incident occurred that gave me the trigger for a plot. I was listening to the radio in the car one day when I heard the name of one of my former colleagues being denounced. The sort of thing that you might think would cheer you up; until you find out why and how and for what he is being denounced. His private e-mail correspondence on the university server had been published in an online magazine and he was being denounced for allegedly racist, sexist and other crimes against political correctness. Nothing about his work, his teaching, his publications. Just his private e-mails between close friends. It cost him $80,000 to get an injunction to prevent further e-mails being published. The university, instead of saying we assert the principle of confidentiality of private communications and respect of copyright, tossed him to the wolves and suspended him for incorrect thoughts and prohibited language, ultimately forcing him into retirement.

I avoided looking at the online magazine or investigating the details, and created a character quite unlike my former colleague—for obvious legal reasons. But I used the way in which private correspondence could be accessed, either hacked into or downloaded, published and used to destroy someone’s career. It provided the starting point for a novel dealing with the issues of internet and other surveillance. And it took me deeper into conspiracy theory. Not only your private correspondence can be used against you, but your potential thoughts deduced from your internet searches and library borrowings and book purchases.

You have probably heard the arguments put forward by so-called libertarians and liberals that the internet is a great liberating force and should be free from censorship or regulation. Fullalove, a conspiracy theorist who is an offsider of my private eye, Plant, declares:

The reason there won’t be any censorship of the internet is because its prime function is surveillance. Surveillance and entrapment. The security services and the police need all the evil shit they can get on-line, paedophilia and pornography and snuff movies. They need the jihadist sites and neo-Nazi sites and lists of intelligence agents and WikiLeaks and instructions on how to make a bomb. They need all that freely available on the internet so that they can monitor who’s logging onto it. So they can nab them and turn them into informers. Or gaol them. Or eliminate them.

“Eliminate them?” Plant asks.

Whatever. What they do isn’t the point. The point is they want it all out there uncensored so they can run surveillance. Better than having it go underground. To their way of thinking. So when they bang on about keeping the internet free from government interference what they’re really doing is facilitating the surveillance and entrapment systems of the secret state.

Political correctness and the intrusive surveillance to enforce it provided a subsidiary theme. Fullalove sees a subversive and money-making opportunity:

“Old books. Second hand books. All the dodgy stuff. Politics. Pornography. Art books, too, maybe. Because the time is coming when they’re going to say books are obsolete. Like photographic film. Vinyl. Everything’s going to be digitised. And maybe it will be but probably not. But the point is, once things are digitised they can be monitored. Like your phone and internet and emails and library borrowings and travel card. All recorded. And the data all retrievable.”

“Uh-huh,” Plant grunted. “Go on.”

Though Fullalove needed no encouragement.

“So, mate, who’s going to borrow a library copy or order an e-book of Capital or The Story of O or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Socialism Utopian and Scientific or Fanny Hill or Mein Kampf? You want to read those books, but you don’t want to leave any record. Olympia Press stuff, the Kama Sutra, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Junky … You don’t want to lose your job, open yourself up to blackmail, get yourself on a watch list for life.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There’s going to be a market for all this stuff. The ever expanding list of the politically incorrect. Huckleberry Finn, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Ten Little Niggers … think of it. Left wing, right wing, classic sex and drugs, books you don’t want someone being able to tell your wife or your husband or your boss or your local copper that you’ve been reading. It’s all recorded, library borrowings, e-books, internet searches and downloads. The information is going to be used. Inevitably. It already is. Recruitment agencies, head hunters for executive jobs, they trawl through all that information like they trawl through antisocial media.”

Fullalove sees a way of making money by providing hard copies of unacceptable books for cash, no records, no surveillance.

“So, I’m collecting books. Traditional, secure, old fashioned books in hard copies. Krafft-Ebing and Kinsey and The Happy Hooker and Lolita and Beautiful Losers and The Ginger Man. All the stuff they used to ban, and all the stuff that poured out when they stopped banning books …”

“You’re saying all this stuff is going to be banned again? Like they used to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover and …”

“No, not banned, man. The days of censorship by the authoritarian state are over. No, everything’s going to be available. But on the internet, so it’s all monitored. By the same authoritarian state. Now it’s all about entrapment. Now you can get anything you want on the internet and get yourself put on a police or security watch list as soon as you look it up. How’s that for an advance in civil liberties?”

Political and social themes are not foreign to crime fiction. Once or twice even Sherlock Holmes got involved in sensitive diplomatic cases. One of the great popular novels of the nineteenth century, Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, provided an enduring model for such issues. The protagonist, Edmond Dantès, escapes after years in jail to seek out those responsible for his imprisonment. His alleged crime is something now a generation or more in the past, in a time of a very different political world, a world whose values have now been repressed and denied. This concept of the events of a past generation and a past politics surfacing into an inquiry many years later has been used by a number of writers since Dumas. I used it for the first of my crime novels, The Prisoner of Mount Warning.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s I had written for a number of dodgy, dubious publications. And I don’t mean those of the Packer, Fairfax and Murdoch presses. I mean those alternative and underground papers as they used to be called, those anarchic and radical and supposedly subversive products of the free press.

It was always something of a mystery as to who funded them, but that was not something you ever asked. In one of my moods of reflective, retrospective paranoia, I considered the possibility that they weren’t alternative at all, not all of them anyway. Maybe they were actually funded by the state. Maybe the opposition they allegedly represented was an opposition controlled by the secret services. This was not an original idea. Joseph Conrad uses it in Under Western Eyes and George Orwell re-used it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The point of it, Fullalove explains, is:

“… to make the suckers think they’re getting something different. Another point of view. There isn’t another point of view. Not that gets into print. You know that.”

“So why do they bother?”

“Spoilers,” said Fullalove. “To stop anyone setting up anything real. They occupy the space, make people think every angle’s covered. If they weren’t there, somebody’d say, ‘Hey, why don’t we have an alternative street paper? Or a radical weekly? Or a critical monthly?’ So this crap is put out to make it look like the gaps are filled.”

“Who puts it out, then?”

“Who does everything? The people who brought you the Gulf War, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, Pakistan, Kosovo, the women’s movement, Vietnam, Solidarity, the Mujahudin, the Contras, Cultural Freedom, Abstract Expressionism …”

The Prisoner of Mount Warning is a crime novel that looks at our recent history. What were the 1960s and 1970s really about? How authentic were those stoned revolutionaries? What if it was all a fraud? And I got so caught up in the nostalgia of that world of peace and love and non-violence that I forgot to get anyone murdered.

I’ve returned to the theme in my next book, Little Demon, which asks what was behind the communes and hippie settlements of the 1960s and 1970s. Fullalove, my conspiracy theorist, has a suggestion:

Some spontaneous upsurge of love and peace? They may have thought that, the hippies. But they were just the laboratory rats for the scenario for the next war and its aftermath. The big one … All these communes, all these hippie settlements, they were part of an experiment to see if people could survive after nuclear war. See if they could go back to the land and start from scratch. Build some huts. Start families to begin repopulating. Develop social organisation. What the ruling class were afraid of was a return to barbarism after the place had been nuked. So they set up these controlled experiments.