Crime Novels on the Sly

When people ask me, “Which famous writers or books have influenced you?” I tend to come out with the usual suspects. Raymond Chandler, James Lee Burke, Elmore Leonard. Add to those Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992) by Danish writer Peter Høeg--the first half of possibly the best thriller ever written.

Perhaps surprisingly for a Brit, I don’t cite either Arthur Conan Doyle (whose Sherlock Holmes tales and historical books, such as The White Company, I remember as childhood bedtime reading) or Agatha Christie (except for the few books she published in the final psychedelic years of her life, such as the phenomenal Passenger to Frankfurt).

A lot of times, though, when I’m driving on a motorway or staring at the page-by-page plan of my current book, my mind moves back to a slim book I read when I was 16 and--like a lot of the stuff you read at that age--has stayed with me.

It’s one of the best-selling books of all time, published exclusively in paperback. It’s about a sociable, good-looking young guy with an amazingly attractive girlfriend, living in a pad in a coastal town in a Mediterranean country. One day he gets the message that his mother has died, and so he travels to her nursing home to spend the night beside her coffin. He finds it hard to be pious, however, and is relieved when the funeral is finally over. Back in his hometown, he tries to forget all of that by going to a party on the beach. He gets into a stupid argument with a local laborer and ends up losing his temper completely, grabbing a gun and shooting the guy.

The police arrive.

No forensics, of course. He admits that he did it. When the trial starts, he’s prepared to defend himself on the grounds that he was stressed, not in control of himself, acting totally out of character. What he doesn’t anticipate is that the court becomes fascinated not with the sordid details of the beach party and the shooting, but with the defendant’s sacrilegious behavior on the night he spent beside his mother’s coffin. He is convicted and sentenced to death--not for shooting a passing laborer, but for lack of piety.

The book, of course, is L’Étranger (1942), by Albert Camus (the title can’t be translated from French into English--it’s a pun which means The Foreigner/The Outsider/The Stranger.) Camus was an Algerian writer born in 1910, who adopted French citizenship. He was a good soccer goalkeeper, worked for the French resistance during World War II, looked a lot like Humphrey Bogart, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and died in a car crash at age 51. I read his entire output in French at University, and frankly I wouldn’t wish that on anyone else. But that one book--L’Étranger (generally published in English translation as The Outsider)--keeps coming back to me. The big, good-looking single guy with the neat girlfriend and the problematic relationship with his mother. It’s a motif that’s filtered through into my series character, cop-turned-private eye Tom Fletcher, and that mother relationship is something that came through in Steel Witches, the second book in the series.

I think that L’Étranger is a crime book that doesn’t really know it’s a crime book. It’s a charismatic, violent, quite sexy novel involving guns, guillotines, beach parties, girlfriends, courtrooms, and death. And who could want more than that?