Crime in the Surveillance State

What can we say about the future of the British crime novel? How will the books we read in five or 10 years differ from those we’ve either loved or hated up to now? I have no idea--other than a feeling that, given the way British society is developing, there will be one area of great change, and a second area of less change.

Let’s consider the second topic first. It’s interesting to take as examples two of the most interesting and enjoyable British crime books I’ve read over the past year: Contract, by Simon Spurrier, and Bad Traffic, by Simon Lewis. One is about a contract killer whose victims seem to be resurrecting themselves, the other is about a non-English-speaking Chinese man who is searching for his missing daughter in Britain. I’d recommend both highly, but I ask myself: Is there anything about these books that could not have been written 10 or 20 years ago (or 30, in the case of Contract)? Obviously the characters use mobile phones, PCs, etc. But replace these things with whatever we used before they were around, and the stories would still work. Basically, I don’t think that looking ahead--say, 10 years down the road--crime books which feature private individuals will change in any revolutionary way. (A character getting information by searching on the Internet rather than looking in books or following someone around doesn’t count as revolutionary, to me. Equally, “new” crimes such as people-trafficking and identity theft have always existed--it’s just the scale that’s changed.)

It’s different though, if we think of a separate area--books featuring the forces and agencies of the state. Here, the pace of change is so fast nowadays, and the nature of the relationship between the state and the individual is evolving so radically, that it will have to force alterations in the way that the police, in particular, feature in fiction. For non-British readers, some examples of what is happening here:

• Forty percent of all CCTV cameras in the world are in Britain.

• Twelve percent of UK residents have their DNA stored on a state database. It is taken (by force if needed) from anyone who’s arrested, and is stored permanently, even if the suspects are not charged, or if the arrest is a case of mistaken identity.

• Senior police officers have proposed that the state collect DNA from all babies at birth.

• A large but unknown proportion of schools currently collect and store pupils’ fingerprints without the parents’ knowledge.

• The state is preparing a “national Google” database of all e-mail messages, phone calls, and Internet use by British residents.

• Biometric-ready identity cards will be compulsory from 2012.

I’m not going to reflect in this post on whether these changes are right or wrong (though I do have strong views on these matters). I’m just saying, it’s happening. The result will be a situation where the investigation of crime and the policing of the public will move from being the traditional consensus-based process we are familiar with to an essentially automated system, focused on monitoring (to identify possible criminals before they act) and on the use of databases (to target them after they act).

The role of the state, and above all the police, will be truly revolutionized in Britain over the coming decade. No doubt our future law-enforcement officers will still have their personal crises and secrets, they’ll still drink, listen to music, and crack great one-liners. But they’ll be doing a fundamentally different job for a radically different employer. While we might mourn the inevitable extinction of the 20th-century British police detective, his or her replacement will be stacked with potential for writers of crime fiction.