Shock! Violence in Crime Fiction!

I admit it: I read author Patricia Cornwell’s early work, and I understand why it won publishers’ backing. Her first novel fit nicely into the niche Thomas Harris had carved out with his just slightly older book, The Silence of the Lambs (1988). But now it seems the creator of medical examiner Kay Scarpetta is questioning the intensely graphic direction in which this genre is heading. The Guardian’s Alison Flood quotes Cornwell as saying:

“It’s too realistic in many ways, it has transitioned into something rather frightening, something rather savage, and maybe it needs to revert back a little bit to being a little more deductive and civilised and cerebral,” she tells books site Galleycat, in an interview about her new book Scarpetta.

But until Cornwell came along in 1990 with her first Kay Scarpetta thriller, Postmortem, in which Scarpetta investigates a series of “sex slayings”, crime fiction wasn’t nearly as gruesomely explicit as it is these days.

This--“As long as her knees were bent, the loop around her neck remained loose. When she straightened her legs, either in a reflex to pain or because of the assailant's weight on top of her, the ligature around her neck tightened like a noose ... Her face was grotesque, swollen beyond recognition and a dark bluish purple from the suffusion of blood caused by the tight ligature around her neck”--from Postmortem would never have been found in Agatha Christie.

But the public lapped it up, and Cornwell created a new genre of explicit crime (although I’m sure there must be a better label for it), with her disciples today including Karin Slaughter, Kathy Reichs and Tess Gerritsen.

And the gruesomeness just keeps getting worse: try the horrible premises of the bestselling Richard Montanari (in The Rosary Girls, for example, “a series of young Catholic women are found dead, their bodies mutilated and their hands bolted together”), or Chelsea Cain’s frighteningly sadistic serial killer Gretchen Lowell in Heartsick.

Call me cynical, but I’d take Cornwell’s criticism more seriously if it weren’t for the fact that she’s promoting a new book and therefore trying to drum up media attention in any way she can.

READ MORE: “Patricia Cornwell’s Long-Running Series on Life Support?,” by Clayton Moore (Rocky Mountain News).