Ask me what my favourite British crime movie is, and you’re likely to get a rather guilty pause before I answer. You see, anyone with connections to the North East of England is supposed to say Get Carter. It’s kind of hardwired into the northern cultural consciousness. But the reality is that Get Carter is horribly flawed, a film more popular because of its parts than its whole, and ultimately a decent adaptation of a vastly superior novel. As for the others, well, I loved watching Ben Kingsley and Richard Burton chew the scenery in Sexy Beast and Villain respectively. I loved the determination-turned-psychosis of Billie Whitelaw and Sean Connery in Payroll and The Offence. I always thought Dickie Attenborough’s best performances were as sweaty, weak-minded villains in the likes of Brighton Rock, The League of Gentlemen, Séance on a Wet Afternoon and 10 Rillington Place, just as I always thought Alec Guinness was at his best when he portrayed the venal heart of the British establishment in The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers. Hell, I even have some admiration for Snatch, even though I start to twitch whenever anyone mentions Ritchie’s name in a positive comparison, given the long, lumpy cascade of crap that came in his wake.

But my favourite British crime film, and the one that I think holds up better than any of the above, remains The Long Good Friday. It’s been described as a whodunnit in gangster clothing and a throwback to the classic Warner Bros. crime dramas like Little Caesar and The Roaring Twenties and while both are pretty accurate descriptions, The Long Good Friday is more than the sum of its influences. Unlike Get Carter, which spawned at least two American remakes, The Long Good Friday is a movie firmly rooted in its period and location. The movie is as much about Thatcherism and national (specifically English) hubris in the face of terrorism as it is about a gangster trying to join the upper echelons of society, and it’s that connection to a time and place that weirdly makes the movie all the more relevant today. Shand’s boat is moored where he aims to redevelop, a site that would ultimately turn into Canada Square and Canary Wharf. Shand and his bent copper contact walk along the dock “where they were going to build the 1988 Olympic stadium”, a ridiculous notion at the time, yet one which also seems prescient given that the ExCeL Centre on that very same dock is to be divided into four sports halls for the 2012 Olympics. In many ways, then, Shand is a visionary and his plans are a sharp depiction of the London to come.

Similarly, I can think of no other crime film protagonist that so utterly encapsulates a nation’s relationship with the rest of the western world than The Long Good Friday‘s Harold Shand, whose final “The Mafia? I’ve shit ‘em” speech can be read as both Parthian blow and blustering satire. Shand is the quintessential self-made man, an old-school East End hardman whose business interests may be legit (casinos, pubs) but whose methods certainly aren’t. He’s also a bullish representation of a dying breed, stuck in the mire of Dunkirk spirit nostalgia and his own dubious self-worth. In many respects, he could be a walking cliché, but Bob Hoskins plays Shand with a raw complexity, at once fearsome, funny and fragile, a far cry from the typical movie gang boss. It’s worth remembering that this was his breakthrough role, too – he’d previously been known for his (admittedly tremendous) TV work on Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven. Hoskins’ performance in The Long Good Friday is nothing short of powerhouse, and gives the film an effectively weighty dramatic core that helps it to transcend both its budget and its genre.

Not that The Long Good Friday ever really deals in cliché. This is a movie set in London, but which features no red buses, no black cabs, no shots of Big Ben. It’s a gangster movie, but a majority of the violence is done to the gangsters rather than by them – apart from a nasty little interrogation scene and a final shooting, Shand’s men do little more than round people up and threaten them (albeit in spectacular fashion). Shand’s only true act of violence comes towards the end of the movie, and the death it leaves in its wake is entirely accidental. And while there are stock genre characters – the gangster, the moll, the lieutenant, the bent politician and even more bent copper – they’re given a fresh coat of paint by Barrie Keeffe’s outstanding script (Keeffe also wrote the splendid Sus, which was adapted to the screen in 2010) and cast performances. Mirren in particular makes the otherwise pretty thankless role of Victoria into something special. She’s no moll, but an intelligent, highly-educated woman and perfect balance to Shand’s upbringing and methodology. She is emphatically the only one who can control him, too – it’s Victoria who slaps and grabs a raging Harold and stares him into something approaching sanity.

What really sets The Long Good Friday apart in my mind, however, is its tone. A vast majority of crime movies were rather sombre affairs at the time – witness the po-faced vengeance of Jack Carter – and while Guy Ritchie went on to populate his movies with caricatures of Mockney tough-nuts (nicking PH Moriarty, Alan Ford and even Dexter Fletcher from The Long Good Friday for his casts), the humour in The Long Good Friday is almost entirely ironic without seeming so. Lines like “You don’t go crucifying people outside a church. Not on Good Friday!” and “It’s like one of them silent deadly farts. No clues and then POW, you go cross-eyed.” are delivered without the standard nod-and-a-wink that would come to define the British gangster movie, and are all the more effective because of it. A majority of the funny lines belong to Shand, and they normally come as part of a dramatic scene. The scene where Shand grieves over his dead right-hand man Colin is a key example – when he’s told that his mate’s corpse is going to be taken away by an ice cream van, he says, “There’s a lot of dignity in that, isn’t there? Going out like a raspberry ripple …” giving his grief a sardonic punchline. That Hoskins (and the script) can switch tone as often as it does is thanks to the control and talent of the film’s cast and crew. Of course, Hoskins’ ultimate show reel comes in the deadly serious last few minutes of the film, which remains a masterclass in how to think on screen, as Shand deliberates his situation, cycling through surprise, outrage, violence, planning escape, realising the futility of escape, encroaching despair and then, finally, that sickening resignation to his fate before the inevitable cut to black.

That same fate almost applied to the movie. Originally made for transmission on Lew Grade’s ATV (and financed by his ITC and Black Lion subsidiary), The Long Good Friday proved to be a dicey proposition for the cigar-chewing Lord. He thought the movie to be unpatriotic and potentially dangerous because of the portrayal of the IRA as a force to be reckoned with, and so sought to release the movie in a castrated, incomprehensible 82-minute cut and with Bob Hoskins’ performance dubbed by a bloke from Bilston (David Daker of TV’s Boon – yeah, I know). Thankfully, it was this latter indiscretion that helped rectify the situation, as Hoskins pursued a court order which was supported by no lesser figures than Alec Guinness and Richard Burton, and which embarrassed the star-loving Grade into selling The Long Good Friday to the highest bidder. This ultimately led to the movie being picked up by George Harrison’s fledgling company Handmade Films, which would go on to release Mona Lisa and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and which released The Long Good Friday to excellent reviews and even better business.

That it stands up to scrutiny over thirty years after its release is testament to The Long Good Friday‘s raw power and modern sensibility, and to my mind it’s one of the few British crime movies that live up to the genre’s full potential. If you haven’t seen The Long Good Friday, you need to. If you have, then you need to see it again. Oh, and for those of you who think it’s terrible that a Northerner would opt for a movie set in That London over one set in Newcastle, it’s worth remembering that John Mackenzie was an Edinburgh lad.

And yes, that is true. Pretty nifty. Soon we will have a physical Crime Factory office on the mooooooooon!

But beyond that, we have issues #8 and #9  available in our fancy Kindle store.

Also available is our wildly popular special edition Kung Fu Factory.

No time for preamble, get over there by clicking HERE or on the Amazon link on the right hand of the page.

I like violence. I like it in movies, on my TV and in books. I like MMA fighting. It gives me an adrenaline rush, increases my heart rate, has me holding my breath, my entire body tensing. I like Jason Statham, old marital arts movies with Bruce Lee, Steven Segal, Jackie Chan. I like watching women kick ass. My favourite move fight scene was the one in True Romance where Patricia Arquette’s character is getting the crap beat out of her by some thug played by James Gandolfini, and she’s standing there with blood pouring down her face, barley conscious and she laughs at him and gives him the finger. It was a primal and bloody David and Goliath moment where she eventually takes him down with a corkscrew to the foot and then beats him to death. Fantastic!

I like shows about serial killers. The Dexter series is brilliant. I like Hannibal “The Cannibal”. The scene in Red Dragon where The Tooth Fairy sets his victim on fire and sends him hurdling down the street in a wheel chair was crazy. The Spartacus series is another favourite TV series with all its sex, blood and extreme gore. The episode where the guy got his face sliced off and his brain slid out blew me away. I thought that was amazing.

I like writing violent scenes in my stories, torturing my characters, and hopefully, my readers a little bit. At least evoking emotion from my readers–anger, horror, dread, empathy, etc. I’ve had people say strange things to me after reading one of my stories like how they wouldn’t want to get on my bad side, somehow confusing me, the writer, with my character. Yet, I’m not a violent person. I’m peaceful. I would never intentionally hurt anyone, even if they’d wronged me and would have deserved a good pounding. I’d simply set them on fire in a story to purge any anger, and then I’d meditate, working on forgiveness and understanding.

Violence for me has very clear cut boundaries with well drawn lines of what I find appealing and what I find horrifying or traumatic in a bad way, as I think it does with most people. While I enjoy combat sports like MMA, it’s more about watching two skilled and highly trained fighters battle for supremacy. Witnessing a fight on the street or in a bar for instance, I find upsetting.

In stories and in movies, for me, violence needs to have a purpose. If it’s just violence for its own sake, for the entertainment of it, then I find it a turn off. I didn’t see Hostel and I never watched any of the Saw movies. Had no interest in seeing them. Torture as entertainment seems too much like a snuff film for me. Maybe the Saw movies really aren’t like that, I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen them. It’s just the impression I get from hearing about them. I didn’t see The Passion Of The Christ. No thanks. I don’t need to watch him being tortured, chunks of his flesh ripped out with hooks. I watched the Ted Bundy movie and after I wished I could have unwatched it. The violence done to young innocent women was stomach turning for me. It left me with a feeling of disgust.

A century ago, and as recent as 1962, we had public hangings in Canada. Families would travel hours to witness it, picnicking with their children. I couldn’t image seeing something like that and not being disturbed by it, in a bad way. Violence involving animals sickens me. I could never watch a bull fight, or a dog fight, don’t agree with the seal hunt, or killing whales for sport. I wouldn’t go to a rodeo, even horse racing has me worried about the welfare of the animals. I won’t eat veal.

I suspect the reason we are so seduced by violence is because we like to be shocked and excited, gripping the edge of our seat, holding our breath, our heart pounding, waiting for what’s coming next. That adrenaline rush can be addictive too. In fact there’s actually a twelve step program for Adrenaline Addiction. Seeing violence might appeal to a very primal part of us somehow; humans it seems have always had a lust for blood, and violence has always been a part of the human experience. If you look at the history of humans, the days of the Romans with their gladiator games, feeding people to lions for sport, the Aztecs with their human sacrifices on the steps of their temples, the bloody Inquisition of the Catholic church. It’s always been with us.

I think we must like to see (in the movies) and read about things that we don’t want to do ourselves or experience in our own lives, yet we want to know about them, learn from them. We like to see people triumph over adversity and we live vicariously through that experience, imagining what we might do in the same situation. And perhaps we need these stories, these violent depictions, to witness good triumphing over evil, to remind us which side we’re on. Or to remind us which side we should be on.

On the assembly line this time around we have an embarrassment of talent, including Megan Abbott, who managed to sneak in an interview with CF’s Andrew Nette while attending our recent Launch; Non-fiction ‘Deposition’ by Josh Stallings; Aussie author David Owen is interviewed by David Honeybone; Fiction by Patricia Abbott, Thomas Pluck, Mark Joseph Kiewlak, Benoit Lelievre, Seamus Scanlon, Rob Loughlin and Deborah Sheldon; Charles Willeford dissected by William Boyle; Spi-Fi smut uncovered by James Hopwood; Nerd of Noir on William Friedkin; Cameron Ashley discusses My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf, and more. Yes, more. Why? Because we love you. Well, that, and we have a shithouse union.

What’re you waiting for? A link? Here you are. Well, not here.

HERE

Late last night I attended a packed screening of Kill List and to say that it fucked me up is to put it tres-fucking-mildly. Wheatley’s debut film Down Terrace is one of the true sleepers of the last decade, a crime film by turns loose and funny then disturbingly bloody and deeply unsettling, a truly unpredictable cinematic experience that even its detractors have to admire. With Kill List Wheatley ups the ante considerably. Though not comedic in the amiable way that much of Down Terrace is, it’s often a funny film and more traditionally paced, but its overall effect on the viewer is even more agonizing. There’s no walking away from Kill List without feeling like someone made you swallow some rusty nails

The story concerns itself with Jay, an ex-soldier whose finances are drying up and his wife Shel is giving him shit for it. He’s clearly unstable but he’s decent to his young son, though it’s a shame the boy has to see Jay fight with his mother so viciously. Like Down Terrace, much of the first act of the film concerns itself with extremely rocky domesticity, as we watch Jay and Shel argue and drink and host a shaky dinner party with Jay’s best friend Gal and his girlfriend Fiona. At the party Gal tells Jay that he can get them a decent contract from some rich, mysterious fellas, the job being to kill a priest, a librarian and an MP. Jay agrees to the work and we’re off on a disgustingly violent adventure, but not before the mysterious Fiona puts a strange marking on the back of Shel and Jay’s bathroom mirror…

To say much more than that is risking fucking with the many surprises to be had in Kill List, but I will say that the film is just as much a horror film as it is a crime picture. Whether it completely comes together for you in the end is up to how much ambiguity you can stand, but the journey will be far from fucking boring, I guarantee you. The final revelation made someone in the audience I saw it with scream out “Oh no!” and there were a couple walk-outs – and this was in a film festival screening as part of the midnight movie program, where you’d think folks would be ready for a bit of fucked-uppery. Also, there’s a hammer scene that somehow manages to put the elevator scene in Drive to shame in terms of nasty head trauma.

But even with that vague shit I’ve just spilled I feel like I’m getting close to spoiling some of the films grotesque charms, so how’s about we do some listifying instead. Who doesn’t like lists? Fucking nobody, that’s who. (Negatives, consider yourselves doubled.) Here are some of the films that’ve left me feeling the most unsettled after viewing them that I can recall.

Palindromes (2004) Todd Solondz loves making people uncomfortable – it’s kind of his thing. Storytelling, Happiness and its sequel Life During Wartime, Welcome to the Dollhouse – all films that will leave you queasy and uneasy. But though I think it might be the least successful of his films, Palindromes takes the cake for making me feel absolutely sick. The film is mainly remembered for casting numerous actresses in the part of the main character, a young girl navigating her way through a scary world of religious zealots and paedophiles, but what will always stay with me is a particular scene in the film.

There’s a moment near the end where our heroine is in a motel room her much older boyfriend who has just botched the murder of a doctor who performs abortions, killing the man’s child instead. He’s in absolute despair, reeling from what he’s done, and he cries out, “How many times can I be saved?” It’s a great, sardonic line, but Stephen Adly Guirgis’ performance makes it cut you in half. Never has guilt and anguish, something we noir fans are often attracted to in much of crime fiction, come across so powerfully to me in a film, nor made me feel like I was the one who pulled the trigger.

Hard Candy (2005) I actually fucking hated this film, but because I hated it so much and it made me so fucking angry and upset, I can’t help but begrudgingly admit it that David Slade’s film has some real power to it. It’s the story of a girl (played by a pre-Juno Ellen Page) who poses online as an innocent and naive kid to attract a sexual predator played by Patrick Wilson. Once he’s got her home though she reveals that she’s some sort of paedophile murdering vigilante, turning the tables on Wilson and making him suffer for his crimes.

There’s an extended scene in the movie of an off-screen, not graphic-in-the-slightest castration that had me sweating and checking to make sure my balls were still there the whole time, that’s both a feat of cinematic craft but also, you know, the cheapest way to make a man get light-headed. But what really made this movie linger was how disturbingly quickly I came to hate the Page character and start actually rooting for Wilson’s depraved child-murdering rapist. It’s a disturbing trick Slade pulls off, but I’m not quite sure it was truly his intent with the film. Actually, wait, this may say more about me than the director…

In My Skin (2002) This French film from writer-director-star Marina de Van follows a young, intelligent, successful woman with a dark secret: she is a cutter. Shot in a cold, Kubrickian style, In My Skin starts with her using instruments that don’t leave scars on herself, the hero merely fantasizing about taking apart her body. But events devolve until we’re knee-deep in the blood and skin she has lovingly, blissfully separated for herself, her eyes glowing with ecstasy as she licks her wounds and peels them back with her teeth. I’m all for a good torture-porn flick, but rarely does gore actually unnerve me. This thoughtful, austere approach to the gore and madness makes the body-horror linger well past the “oh shit!” moments.

The White Ribbon (2009) Speaking of Kubrickian, no list of unsettling films could possibly be complete without Michael Haneke’s name being tossed around some. Some viewers loathe the way Haneke fucks with audience expectations and dispassionately abuses his characters, but I’m almost always sucked in by his films, even though I know he will always punish me for whatever good old-fashioned movie thrills I’m deriving from his ART in capital fucking letters. Funny Games, Cache (Hidden), Code Unkown, The Piano Teacher - I’ve loved and “hated” them all, but The White Ribbon has lasted with me the longest simply for its stark, quietly horrific tone and mood.

Set in a quiet German Protestant town in the days before World War I, the film follows many characters in the community as they react to a rash of bizarre, violent occurrences taking place. We never know fully who the perpetrators are (it’s a Haneke movie, after all), but we’re fairly it’s all been done by the children of this town, Haneke possibly making a point about the generation that let Hitler take power. Shot in gorgeous black and white, Haneke manages to make every scene drip with dread and potential for shocking violence, and he does the creepy kid cliché better than any traditional horror movie ever. But what really makes The White Ribbon stand out from the rest of Haneke’s stomach-churning filmography is that you actually care deeply about many of the characters.

Audition (1999) Takashi Miike has made plenty of films that are extreme or graphic, but not a lot of them that are truly disturbing. Audition, with its strangely light and lively first half and truly fucked up home stretch, never lets you feel safe. We follow a widower who uses his film industry contacts to set up an audition for a date, the girls thinking it’s for a big role but the widower just looking for the right woman. But it soon turns out the perfect girl for the part may have some secrets of her own. Miike has put scenes on film far more disgusting than the one in the third act, but few as powerful in their depiction of torture. By teasing it for over and hour only to hit us squarely in the balls for a half hour, he created his most effective and consistent film, and also (say it with me!) his most unsettling.

But what movies have stayed with you, left you feeling like you hung your head over the railing and stared down at the bottom a thousand feet below for too long? Okay, other than Jack and Jill, wiseass.

by Eric Beetner

Here’s my dilemma: I don’t care for guns. They make me nervous. I think the streets would be safer without them. I’d never have one in my house.

Perfectly fine, you say. I’ll never be elected to public office with views like that but that’s not the issue that most concerns me. As a crime reader and writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about guns. And deploying them in the service of plot points and action.

This is no political statement. If you want to have guns, go ahead. Don’t use them to kill me or my family and we’re cool. The fact that I’ll never own a gun means more for you.

I’ll still be the guy who gets a sweaty upper lip whenever there is a cop ahead of me in line at Starbucks with his big ol gun strapped on his hip, taunting me. An instrument of death so close. He could kill me. I could snatch that gun out of his belt and run rampage over everyone waiting in line for a latte. (don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it) What else is there to do but channel those thoughts into fiction?

I never will understand Americans fascination with guns and the justifications they use to own so damn many of them. Then again, I can’t justify why I needed 18 guitars at one point in my life when I can only play one at a time, so . . .

The other thing is, as much as I’d vote for any gun control law that came up, I also need them. If guns went away, my stories would get awfully dull. And I’ll be the first to admit there is little else in the whole wide world as cool as Chow Yun Fat sliding on his back down a banister, a 9mm in each hand, blasting away with a seemingly infinite supply of ammunition. That scene is from my favorite John Woo movie, Hard Boiled (1992), a movie that would be about ten minutes long if you cut out all the guns.

And I have fired a gun. More than once. I went to a shooting range about a week before I got married and shot paper targets with a buddy of mine. Seemed like a thing to do. I didn’t come away with a burning desire to start packing heat.

The gun story from my own life that is most disturbing was the time when my friend Danny and I went out shooting. Danny lived up the street from me when I lived in a small town in Connecticut from the 2nd to 5th grade. So when Danny and I went shooting, we were in the third grade. Let me say that again: when Danny and I went out shooting – not to a gun range but OUT – into the world – I was in the third grade!

The obvious question is how on earth did we get a gun? Why from Danny’s Dad of course. His gun cabinet anyway. Without his permission of course. All this was very nearly used as evidence in my wrongful death suit.

So, bored on a Sunday afternoon, we packed up a revolver of some caliber and a pocketful of shells (apologies to Rage Against The Machine) and headed out to the woods to shoot stuff and quite possibly become a statistic. And what else do third graders (!) shoot at but live frogs.

First we had to catch the frogs. Then, once released from our net, they went out of the frying pan and into the fire. Blammo.

As further evidence of how shit-all stupid we were on this day, and probably many others, we also took shots at – what else? – bee hives. Yep. I shot a gun. At a bee hive. On purpose. Because I thought it would be fun.

The scary moment of the day, and when you’re a third grader with a stolen gun there is always a scary moment, came when Danny shot a frog, as you do, and I figured the obliterated carcass looking like an extra from the beach in Saving Private Ryan was enough for Danny, so I took a few steps forward to continue our shooting adventure. It turned out Danny was not done with the frog massacre and he took another shot which blasted the ground only a few inches from my foot.

But did we stop and run home to stash the gun away again after almost killing one of us? Nope. I think that’s when we switched it up and started shooting at the bees.

And shooting up in trees like that, where did those bullets go? For fucks sake, I was shooting randomly in the Connecticut suburbs like some third grade Billy The Kid. But dammit, this is America and I have the constitutional right to do something that unfathomably dumb if I want to.

Okay, not really since the gun was stolen, I didn’t have a license and again, I was in the third grade.

My point is this: I’m a fan of guns in my fiction, but not in my life. A double standard? Yes. Am I a hypocrite? Probably. But, there it is. I don’t like guns.

I don’t think they are necessary to crime fiction. A lot of damage can be done with a straight razor, brass knuckles, a blowtorch. But nothing quite gets the job done like a firearm. I think of Indiana Jones, so tired and sick of fighting it out with antiquated weaponry like a whip, giving that world-weary sigh and pulling his six shooter and taking out the guy with the big-ass sword. Guns take care of business.

If I lived in the country, maybe I’d feel differently. And, like I said, if you need your guns then good for you. If you hunt for the meat, not just the sport, then you deserve to be a sniper of the highest order. But I live in Los Angeles where guns kill people. Yes, people with the guns kill people but that tired old argument doesn’t fly with me. Hell yes, guns kill people. In south central, in San Pedro, in Pomona, it doesn’t matter. A jackass with a gun is a deadly thing. A jackass without a gun is just a jackass.

Is it my fault that I might like to read a story about a jackass with a gun more than the story about the plain, ordinary jackass?

So until the liberal conspiracy (of which I am a member and yes, we do have a secret handshake) figures out a way to eliminate the second amendment, I’ll continue to read and write about guns. I’ll never join the NRA or anything, but I’ll have to get over my phobia of guns at least in the fictional realm.

There, I can be strapped with bandoliers, an uzi in each hand, the blood of my enemies hot on my face and a girl in a bikini clinging to my leg. Because my use of guns is a fantasy. Yours may not be, and more power to you.

Bet mine is better though.

When it comes to crime fiction, especially in the UK, the police procedural is king, and it’s no secret I’m not much of a fan. My issues with the sub-genre boil down to my distaste for cheap characterisation and sociological Manichaeism, and my fundamental belief that the circumstances of crime are more interesting that the investigation. But then, my opinion is clearly the minority, and it’s impossible for me to tar an entire sub-genre when there are so many outstanding exceptions. That’s right, I’m gonna turn that figurative frown upside down and hereby present, for your delectation and delight, ten authors whose police novels deserve your attention.

1) Charles Willeford. Of course I was going to mention Willeford. His Hoke Moseley ranks as one of the most ornery, bigoted, cheap and put-upon detectives in crime fiction. The books have little in the way of police procedure – Hoke isn’t even a cop by the third book, having suffered a rather spectacular nervous breakdown – but make up for it in sheer absurdism. I can only dream what the fifth book – provisionally titled Nobody Walks and with Hoke investigating dirty cops – would have been like. Start with Miami Blues and continue on through. They’re all good.

2) Joseph Wambaugh. Despite his recent resurgence with Hollywood Station, Wambaugh has never really garnered the kind of sustained kudos he deserves, perhaps because his cops are all too human and contradictory to appeal to a wide enough audience. Wambaugh also typically eschews the mystery aspect of his novels in favour of a more freewheeling, character- and anecdote-based narrative. While his early novels are still superb, the one where he both broke the mould and found his voice is The Choirboys.

3) Stuart MacBride. Perhaps an odd choice on the face of it, seeing as he’s ostensibly the purveyor of the same kind of big-brick mainstream police procedural novels mentioned in the opener. I’d argue that MacBride cuts deeper than that, though – while his novels are seriously in the procedural vein, his extended cast recall Wambaugh and Wingfield in the sharply-drawn and human characterisation, and his sense of humour, both bitterly ironic and deeply silly, sets him apart from the rest. That he has managed to achieve mainstream success makes him all the more subversive. Cold Granite is his first, but Flesh House or Blind Eyes are my personal favourites. No doubt they’ll completely fuck up any adaptations.

4) Bill James. Another subversive in the ranks of British crime fiction, James’ Harpur and Iles novels are archly written and devastatingly witty. His detectives are both wholly unpleasant people to be around, but filtered through James’ gimlet eyes, they become grimly comic and often succeed in making the criminals more sympathetic by comparison. He is, needless to say, extremely popular in France and virtually unknown in the UK, despite having published 28 novels in the Harpur and Iles series alone. I’ve yet to read them all, but I’d recommend Protection as the gateway, It was good enough for me.

5) James Ellroy. The Demon Dog himself. Is there anybody reading this who hasn’t read an Ellroy novel? If so, shame on you, and get thee to a bookstore this instant. Like Mingus’ nod to Charlie Parker, if Ellroy was a gunslinger, there’d be a whole lot of dead copycats. Many have attempted to ape Ellroy’s finger-snappin’, staccato prose, and they have all failed, mostly because Ellroy’s voice is wholly Ellroy, the kind of syncopated opera of corruption that can only come from a man as conflicted and publicly deranged as Ellroy himself. His cops share these contradictions, a mess of raging, horny, venal, backsliding, careerist murderers and thieves. Start with the easiest and yet possibly the grisliest of the LA Quartet, The Black Dahlia.

6) Georges Simenon. Like Ellroy, Simenon was something of a criminal manqué and of course his best novels are about the criminal experience, but there’s something to be said for the Maigret novels, mostly because they aren’t what you may think. Yes, they’re sometimes slight and sometimes Maigret’s intuition is a convenient replacement for logic, but Maigret was the quintessential empathetic detective, one more concerned with circumstances of crime than apprehending the criminal. The only real issue is where to start with a 75-novel series. They’re all good in their own way, but my intro was Maigret in Court, which shows a clear disdain for the judicial process and has Maigret actively investigating beyond his original arrest.

7) Ed McBain. One of the saddest things about Ed McBain’s death in 2005 was that it went so unremarked. This was probably because McBain’s bibliography doesn’t feature one outstanding novel. Instead he produced a whole slew of them, most notably the 87th Precinct series which happened to provide a blueprint for every large-cast American police procedural to follow on both paper and screen. The 87th Precinct novels, all 55 of them, are ostensibly pretty straightforward – there’s a crime to be solved and several ongoing plot threads – but what makes them special is the no-frills, cinematic writing and humanist approach. You could start with the first one, Cop Hater, but I have a soft spot for Sadie When She Died.

8 ) Ken Bruen. From McBain to Bruen’s tribute to the same, the Brant novels might appear to be the funnier, more obviously tabloid side of Bruen’s bibliography, but in their parody, they represent an almighty fuck-you to the po-faced sententiousness of a majority of police procedurals, especially on this side of the pond – the UK cover of Taming the Alien even featured a distorted view of one of UK crime fiction’s grand dames (or should that be Baroness?). Bruen’s ultra-hardboiled prose is the stuff of legend, and the frequent collisions between hardcase cop and headcase killer have rarely been as much fun. You can breeze through the first three in the series, but Blitz is the one where shit gets real.

9) Derek Raymond. The Factory novels are a milestone in what Raymond called “the black novel”. Again, there’s rarely any police procedure beyond the nameless sergeant’s dogged empathy, and any investigation is more of the intuitive, metaphysical variety than any real legwork. On the face of it, the Sergeant is the typical maverick – problems with his superiors, a suitably tragic backstory – but in Raymond’s hands, the detective is less a righter of wrongs (though he may talk that way) than he is an explorer of the darkest shadows. The finest of the novels is undoubtedly He Died With His Eyes Open, and it also happens to be the most accessible.

10) Chester Himes. Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones are not your usual cops – one is jittery and hideously scarred, and both carry hand cannons that would make Harry Callahan feel inadequate. Mind you, their beat isn’t exactly usual, either. Chester Himes’ Harlem is a crime burlesque, filled with conmen and killers, drug dealers and pimps, all painted as vividly as a tenement mural. Johnson and Jones are fond of their “extralegal” investigative methods, which included extreme violence and psychological torture, and these methods are fully in tune with the whirling, absurdist rage that defines Himes’ key novels. The detectives make their first, albeit cameo, appearance in A Rage in Harlem, but their first real case comes with The Real Cool Killers.

And so there you have it. No doubt I’ve missed many more and I’m sure I’ll be roundly reprimanded for my absent mind. I’m aware that my list is decidedly testosterone-heavy, too. Any suggestions of female writers are very welcome, so sound off in the comments if you know of any.

by Eric Beetner

The worst writing advice ever is also probably the most common: Write what you know.

For anyone out there thinking of writing that amazing novel you know lives inside you, please, for the love of all that is Holy, DO NOT WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW. Make something up!

To be a storyteller is the true talent in the fiction game. If you want to write a memoir, then write a memoir. I won’t buy it, but go right ahead. People line up in droves to read depressing tales of terrible childhoods, unexpected tragedies, family pets that are doomed to die. Fine by me, but after you’ve written your story, what then?

Joan Didion has given us yet another sadness monologue and I have to think it lessens the impact of the first and the second of her confessional sadologues. If your Uncle tells the same story each year at Christmas, don’t you kind of get sick of it? If someone gets divorced for a third or fourth time, don’t you feel a little less sorry for them? Maybe a little annoyed that you have to keep buying gifts (like $25 hardcovers)?

You have to live a pretty extraordinary life to truly justify writing a whole book about yourself. And face it, you and 98% of all memoirists have not lived that life.

And here, in the crime fiction world, I don’t think anyone I know would have a damn thing to write about if we wrote what we know. I’ve never been in a shootout, been hired to kill someone, operated a meth lab, plotted to murder my wife, looked for a good place to bury a body – but I’ve written about all those things.

Now I know the true spirit of “Write what you know” is to write about places and types of people you are familiar with, time periods, jobs, dialects, all that stuff. Too often people take it way too literally though. Daniel Woodrell writes what he knows about. FX Toole wrote what he knew about. Books like that are more real because of it.

But they also contain a hell of a lot of imagination and made up stuff.

So how about we START with what you know. A good first step. If you’re wondering where to set your book, why not begin with where you grew up or where you live now? You don’t have to name check every street and local business, but you are going to give your story an infusion of reality it might not already have. The too-much-detail trap is one novice writers easily fall into. In the end, readers don’t give a crap if your every detail is right. And the few that do and go out of their way to write you an angry letter about it, they would have found something wrong anyway.

My go-to for this is always Rebecca Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel series. She started with something she knew well (Berlin) and then let her imagination wander. The book is based in a truth, but Rebecca is too young to have lived through the rise of the Nazis and too sweet to be involved with any of the underground doings of Ms. Vogel. And for me as a reader, I have no idea if the train stops are named correctly, but when a book is filled with the kind of vibrant and real detail that could be real or is made up so well it feels real? Mission accomplished.

My father wrote me after he read my first novel and pointed out a few historical inaccuracies since he lived through the era and I did not. Of everyone who has read the book, no one else seemed bothered that I merged the names of two railroads about a decade before they actually joined forces. I was thrilled to be able to come back and tell him that I had in fact not gotten the song playing on the jukebox wrong. I looked it up on the billboard charts for 1939 and had my proof.

That brings us to RESEARCH. The fact is, if you’re doing it right, you can start out writing about something you don’t know at all, and by the end you WILL know about it. If you want to write a different city, different era, different career for your protagonist, then please do take the time to educate yourself a little on the subject. Trust me, you will fool us all into thinking you are writing, “what you know”, because by the time I get to read it in a book, you will absolutely know what you’re talking about.

But still, my advice? Make it all up. From the names and places to the actions people take. If everyone only wrote what they knew there would be no Science Fiction section in the library. No Romance section for that matter.

Crime is the same way. It’s fantasy. A dark, twisted fantasy, but still a world of make-believe. Romance and Sci Fi readers turn pages to get a glimpse into what could be. Crime readers (I think, anyway) open a book to get a dose of, “Whew! I’m so lucky, that could be me!” We’re all closet criminals who don’t have confidence enough in our big plans for a caper or the guts to pull a trigger. (Ben Whitmer gets a pass on the latter. He might shoot me just for implying he doesn’t have the stones to shoot me.)

So don’t write what you know, write what you want to know more about. Make some shit up. Put something in there that could never happen in my life. I don’t read to continue my own life, I read to get a glimpse into someone else’s. I have plenty of my life. I love it. Wouldn’t trade it for anything. I happen to enjoy the superior feeling I get when I read about a criminal whose life is going to hell. I can always close the book and be instantly back in my cushy world. But if you’ve taken me somewhere else, made me believe in other people – people you made up! – that beats anything you know any day of the week.

The event was used to launch the Australian edition of Crime Factory the First Shift. Thanks to Rob from Brunswick Bound for selling on the night and stocking our book exclusively at his store.

Our biggest thanks, however, must go to our speakers:
Irish-born, Australian-captive Adrian McKinty; The new king of Australian noir, David Whish-Wilson; author of the Simone Kirsch stripper/PI series Leigh Redhead and Edgar Award-Winner, Megan Abbott, who collectively kicked us off with far more class and style than we could have possibly dreamt of.

Not to mention the smooth sounds of After Dark, My Sweet, headed up by my Melbourne’s own Darcy McNulty.

Our acronym-hoarding MC, EIC Cameron Ashley, lent his trademark charm to glue the event together, and Crime Factory Godfather David Honeybone won the crowd over by being so damned likeable!

And a huge thanks must go to Asha Madge and Richard Pendavingh, who photographed the event for nothing more than a beer and a suitcase filled with gold bullion.

Anyway, enough writing. It was great. Here are photos of the pretty people for the benefit of those of you who couldn’t make it:

Adrian McKinty

David Whish-Wilson

Leigh Redhead

Cam Ashley

David Honeybone

Megan Abbott

CF Editor Andrew Nette

CF Editor Liam José