Natasha Cooper in Conversation
Fault Lines 19 Jul 99
How do you feel about being the current Vice Chairman of Crime Writers Association and the prospect of being the Chairman in the year 2000, especially given the accusations in the press that "daggers are drawn as black leather jackets take on the blue rinses" at the CWA?
Jane Jakeman's piece about the CWA's AGM was highly inaccurate to say the least. Although we have around 400 members, and much of today's new fiction is classed as crime, you can't really categorise authors in this way - the stereotypical crime novel no longer exists and so battle lines can't be drawn.
At the CWA we have lively discussions on all aspects of crime writing but to call this infighting is wholly inaccurate.
What's the story behind your latest book?
Some writers plan their novels around a single character; others start with the plot. I tend to start with an emotion, around which ideas begin to cluster like crystals forming on a thread suspended in solution. The process can take ages and usually begins one or two books in advance. Sometimes the emotion belongs to the criminal; sometimes it's the rather different sort of feeling that pushes the sleuth into investigation; occasionally it's the victim's terror as he or she realises what is about to happen.
In Creeping Ivy, which introduced barrister Trish Maguire, it was a terrorised child's reaction to an all-powerful adult's controlling behaviour that set off the process. In Fault Lines, which again features Trish Maguire, the first emotion was the terror of a woman waking in the middle of the night to discover a masked intruder creeping towards her, armed with a sharpened screwdriver.
Over several months that woman became a social worker living alone after the break-up of a longterm but unhappy relationship. She grew into an excellent, affectionate, trustworthy woman called Kara, and she became a friend of Trish Maguire over a case on which they were both working.
As Kara developed in my mind, along with the London suburb to which she had moved, ideas began to cluster around that first explosive emotion. Among them was a preoccupation with the way we let our personal reactions to people govern our response to what they do and say.
The prologue to Fault Lines is more violent than any of my earlier novels, and the crime itself is both more realistic and more horrible. But it still falls a long, long way short of some of the explicit torture and killing scenes created by the more hardboiled crimewriters, and it leaves most of the crime to the reader's imagination.
As we near the end of the century, how do you think that a writer should approach the question of violence?
The question of how much violence to include in a novel is a difficult one and each writer can answer only for herself. I do not find violence exciting, and I happen to detest reading graphic descriptions of physical cruelty, but over the years I have been writing crime novels I have come to believe that a bit of realism is necessary.
We live in a violent society. It is not only the victims who are damaged by violence; it is also the perpetrators and the spectators. Because of that, I believe that crimewriters have to walk a narrow path between producing descriptions of violence that will titillate susceptible readers (and, in extreme cases, perhaps encourage them to act out their own violent fantasies) and writing so cosily that murder seems no more important than a stubbed toe. It has been claimed that one of the reasons for violence in children is not that the have been excited by screen fights, but that they have seen people hit, shot and stabbed on screen, only to get up and walk away almost unharmed.
Sometimes, of course, writers use accounts of violence deliberately to shock readers into seeing what they might have preferred to ignore, and that may be a good thing. It all depends…
Writers have to take responsibility for what they offer their readers and yet they cannot decide who those readers will be. Back in the 1950s, during a spate of ludicrous obscenity trials, one of the more enlightened judges made the point that juries having to decide whether a novel would tend to 'deprave or corrupt' should not have to assume that the typical reader would be a fifteen year old girl. Adult readers can always skip a passage they find offensive or, in extreme cases, stop reading the book altogether.
And sexuality? Should a contemporary writer opt for frankness or discretion?
Much the same goes, I believe, for sexuality. It has to be up to individual writers to write what they have to write for the readership they wish to reach. No one is forced to read a novel, just as no one is forced to sit watching something they dislike on television. They can switch off the set; they can close the book. Most readers are more than capable of exercising that choice.

(Courtesy of Simon and Schuster)

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