Robert Musil, Derek Raymond, and some fat guy on the roof breaking into my house

My proto-crime fiction posts, in which I discover antecedents for crime fiction in the world's great literature, are sometimes a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I‘m deadly serious when it comes to The Man Without Qualities. Consider the introduction of Moosbrugger in Chapter 18 of Robert Musil’s great unfinished novel:

"Moosbrugger was a carpenter, a big, broad-shouldered man without any superfluous fat, with hair like brown lamb’s-skin and harmless-looking great fists. His face also expressed good-hearted strength and the wish to do right, and if one had not seen these qualities, one would have smelt them, in the rough-and-ready, straightforward, dry, workaday smell that went with this thirty-four-year-old man, from his having to do with wood and a kind of work that called for steadiness as much as for exertion.

"One stopped as though rooted to the spot, when for the first time one encountered this face so blessed by God with all the signs of goodness, for Moosbrugger was usually accompanied by two armed gendarmes and had his hands shackled before him to a strong steel chain, the grip of which was held by one of his escorts."

That's a lot more effective than the scores of chapters told from inside a killer's head, usually in italic type, that fill contemporary crime novels.

I happened to flip through the opening chapter of Derek Raymond's How the Dead Live recently. That chapter, in which a crowd of bored, restless detectives thoroughly take the piss out of a lecturer who presumes to know how psychotic killers think, would make a nice companion to Musil's Moosbrugger passage. Both confront the salient fact that, for most authors and most readers, the gap between death and killing on the one hand and ordinary experience on the other is unbridgeable, unimaginable, even.

Musil and Raymond embrace the gap and make it part of their stories. Most crime writers, on the other hand ignore it, which is why all those passages from inside the killer's head are so much cheap and showy play-acting, more skillfully executed or less depending on the author's (and editor's) skill with words. It's also why not just Musil, acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's great authors, but also Derek Raymond, is infinitely greater than— well, you know who those writers are.

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Here's another passage from Musil that I hope you'll enjoy as much as I did:

"She was capable of uttering the words ‘the true, the good and the beautiful’ as often and as naturally as someone else might say ‘Thursday’."

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And now, it's a quiet night, but I hear strange noises on my roof: whispered orders, the skittering of small feet, the thump of larger ones, someone trying to break in. Time to reach for a shotgun and defend my castle.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Peace process

I've heard it said that a writer's style ought to be transparent, invisible. I've also heard it said that anyone who believes that has no style of his or her own.

David Peace has style. That style is self-conscious, telegraphic, literary. Sentence fragments to open chapters of 1977 give way to (slightly) more conventional narrative flow as chapters develop. Snippets of interior monologue in italic are interspersed in the text. Transitions are choppy.

It's literary as all hell, and boy, does it ever work. A harried cop and a burned-out reporter are on the tail of the Yorkshire Ripper, who rapes, kills and mutilates prostitutes. Cop and reporter are each involved in the victims' world more than professionally. A community terrorized? Well, yes, but here the terror seems to radiate from within the characters.

Crime fiction need not argue its case on any terms but its own. But if anyone feels a need to argue that a crime novel can be a literary novel and work as both, Peace might be a good place to start.

More later, probably, since I'm just 142 pages into one book of a quartet. For now, though, a question: What authors whom you have read, crime or otherwise, emphasize literary style the most? How do they do this? And how do you like the results?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009