Phil Brett

Phil Brett

Phil Brett is a primary school teacher, who has written two novels (Comrades Come Rally and Gone Underground) set in a revolutionary Britain of the near future. In between planning lessons and marking, he is writing the third.

Lesley Woods, lead singer for the Au Pairs
Friday, 27 May 2016 11:05

No-one's little girl: gender and guitars in post-punk pop music

Published in Music

Phil Brett riffs on the political meanings of some great post-punk pop groups.

Forty years ago punk exploded into the national conscience, with bands like The Clash, Sex Pistols and The Jam developing a huge following. Much as I love these bands, I want to focus on what followed from that burst of energy, the music which is now called post-punk. Inspired by punk, it was originally lumped in with it, but it was music which drew in a range of influences such as electronic music, reggae, funk, Bowie and jazz. By 1978, musicians wanted to move away from what Andy Gill of the Gang of Four describes as punk, being “slightly faster, slightly worse played heavy metal”. New wave was a term which was also sometimes used, but that conjured up rather insipid radio-friendly versions of punk by session musicians wearing skinny black ties.

Post-punk was I believe, a period of sublime creativity which had the questioning of music and indeed of society at its heart (and often its mind). Much of the mainstream music press has either ignored or downplayed its political aspect. That is a mistake, because not only did the music sometimes contain some pretty unambiguous political views (examples of which will follow), but even when it didn’t, it was indirectly political, similar to the point which Nick Grant makes in his article on Snarky Puppy.

Too often, music history merely looks at individuals as if they live in a social vacuum. In this case pages have been spent debating who was the most important - John Lydon or Malcolm McLaren. Yet, for me that is a secondary issue. More interesting is why, when the biggest audience the Pistols ever played to (as headliners) was 100 people, did they have such an effect? So many people who saw them were inspired to form bands, including some famous names, that in some ways it would be easier to compile a list of individuals who did not form one.

The answer lies in the fact that there was a receptive audience to what the Pistols offered. Late seventies Britain had seen the decline in the militancy of trade unions. Movements such as feminism and anti-racism had made gains but had stalled. The Labour Government of Callaghan had brought in policies which Thatcher gleefully took up. The National Front (NF) was leeching on people’s dissatisfaction and growing in size. Grey Britain was matched by grey plodding rock music. Here then was a milieu which contained elements that would embrace punk and nurture post-punk. A squatting movement had grown up, taking over the empty houses which lay derelict. The hippy 1960s idealism and sense of rebellion lingered, maybe not in its former strident terms, but it was still there. A pub-rock circuit had emerged, desperately trying to provide an alternative to the excesses of Yes et al.

Recently, in a reaction against punk’s emphasis on ‘street cred’, much has been made of the involvement of art school students in punk and post-punk, downplaying the working class. Leaving aside the interesting point as to why punk felt the need to pledge allegiance to ‘the street’, I believe this class denial stems from a snobbish belief that the working class cannot innovate artistically and needs the middle class to do so. The recent obituaries of George Martin, which tried to paint the son of a carpenter and cleaner as some toff who brought culture to four scruffs from Liverpool, and the Lydon/McLaren debate, are examples of this.

But many of the musicians involved in punk and post-punk were working class. Many who listened to it, including myself, were working class. It should be added that art schools at that time allowed access for some of the working class to express creativity, something which present government polices of pricing higher education out of even the lower middle class reach is destroying. Disaffected working class and art school youth wanted something different: the Pistols came along and suggested something.

Punk spat in the face of bourgeois respectability. Why, even the punk dance, the pogo, didn’t have any moves! Just up and down. It was chaos against order. Things moved quickly though. Central to punk’s ethos were two things: the primary one was, to steal a quote from Miles Davis, “Do not fear mistakes – there are none”. This encouraged everyone to form a band, including people who have historically have been excluded from rock – women. The second was the attitude of “questioning everything, challenging everything” (Mark Stewart. The Pop Group). For me, those music critics who like to deny political influence in anything which doesn’t include Marxist theory (which actually, The Pop Group and Gang of Four did try to do in their time!) miss the fun and power of the music. Post-punk, even when singing about map references or love, was made in a spirit of do-it-yourself, of greater inclusiveness and the challenging of the established order, often on independent labels who were fiercely anti-corporate. Not political?

Within the post-punk pot there were people who had explicit links with political organisations, for example, Green Gartside (Scritti Politti) and the parents of Richard Kirk (Cabaret Voltaire) were Communist Party members. The Redskins were members of the Socialist Workers Party, and Phil Oakley (Human League) has said that the Sheffield post-punk scene were all ‘Old Labour’. However, like the majority of the population, most did not belong to specific groups, but instead were people who were dissatisfied with late seventies Britain. They may not have had a clear worked-out world view but they had a view that the world was not working out.

This atmosphere of questioning of the norm opened space for creativity. Punk had kicked the door open and post-punk ran in. Siouxsie Sioux has said, “The punk thing was really good for women. It motivated them to pick up a guitar rather than be a chanteuse.” To which should be added the powerful effect of such participation had on women listening to and seeing women make music. The currently much used (and misused) term of empowerment can correctly be applied here. How could it not be, when Poly Styrene opens X Ray Spex’s debut single with, “Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think, Oh bondage up yours!”

Poly Styrene: Love Music Hate Racism

However, one should not exaggerate the involvement of women; it remained a male dominated arena although the number of female musicians, whilst still a minority, grew in these years. Those who were involved had to battle the contradictions of the ‘scene’ because whilst all in it felt duty-bound to denounce the conservatism of the music business, many still echoed it, with female musicians facing sexism from other bands, music journalists and television. Also, despite the importance of funk and reggae to it, post-punk was also overwhelmingly white.

Simply by their gender, female musicians challenged the status quo, but it is important not to think that just because bands such as Penetration, Delta 5, Girls at our Best, The Slits, The Raincoats and Essential Logic had female musicians that they were similar in style or attitude. I asked Viv Albertine (guitarist of The Slits) at a book launch for her biography whether there was a feeling of kinship between them and bands such as The Raincoats. Her answer was that they treated them like any band, either dismissing them or seeing them as rivals. She added that only now does she see such a connection. On reflection, it was probably a dumb question, probably due to being star- struck (the Slits being one of my favourite bands). I mean, do male musicians necessarily feel a brotherhood with each other?

But to see it all as purely mere individual rebellion is too simplistic. Many were drawn to collective action, most notably Rock against Racism (RAR), the sister organisation of the Anti-Nazi League. RAR organised scores of gigs across the country against the threat of the NF, with the largest in Victoria Park in 1978. The headline act was The Clash, but frankly X Ray Spex blew them off the stage. I admit to feeling joy at seeing her again at the 2008 anniversary festival at the park, and feeling satisfaction that Poly Styrene was as strong and charismatic as she had been all those years before. (There were other examples of direct links with campaigns, such as The Pistols playing a benefit for striking fireman at the Christmas of 1977 and The Slits, Au Pairs and Pop Group playing the 1980 Beat the Blues festival at Alexandra Palace, north London).

The Slits: Typical Girls 

The Slits probably should be labelled punk, as they were there in the beginning. However, such a label can be misleading. They had always wanted to avoid what they saw as male guitar rock, with Albertine developing a scratchy style which nodded toward funk and reggae, but which created a new and wonderful sound. Ari Up’s whooping singing with its German-accented English mixed with Jamaican patois bounced around Albertine’s guitar, Tessa Pollitt’s bass and Palmolive’s drums. Produced by reggae musician Dennis Bovell, their debut album Cut (1979), stands as a stunning classic, quite unlike the standard riffs which rock recycles. It is fresh, even after forty years. Their songs, like X Ray Spex’s, were a mixture of anti-consumerism and anti-gender stereotyping. Their best known song, the great Typical Girls, is about the latter, listing the clichés associated with women (“Typical girls worry about spots, fat/and natural smells, stinky fake smells”). The song Newtown addresses the young taking drugs to relieve the boredom, including “televisena” and “footballina”.

The Slits moved further into dub and elements of jazz. Free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry joined them, at their personal expense, on one of their last tours alongside reggae ‘toaster’ Prince Hammer with the band deciding to alternate top billing between the three. An apt illustration of their outlook on life: can you imagine Coldplay doing that?

With post-punk wanting to move as far away from the rock canon as possible, the jazz influence grew, with even Miles Davis playing on a Scritti Politti single, Oh Patti (Don’t Feel Sorry for Loverboy). This was especially the case with free jazz. At the final stages of the Slits' life, they were joined by Cherry’s step-daughter (and future 80s pop star) Neneh. She co-founded, with ex-members of The Pop Group, Rip Rig and Panic - itself a name derived from a Roland Kirk album - to a create a glorious and sometimes quite bonkers mix of post-punk, jazz impro and dub, with Don Cherry also appearing on some tracks.

Jazz and post-punk also shared a belief in strong record sleeve design, feeling that it could complement the music within it - see my piece Wearing their Politics on their Sleeves. They inherited this from punk, using artists such as Jamie Reid, who had designed the cover of the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and whose ideas were imbued with Situationism. No doubt, the art school influence also played a part. The second Raincoats album, Odyshape (1981), features the Kazimir Malevich painting Peasant Woman.

 Bodyshape

The Raincoats were often tagged as a feminist band, co-founder Gina Birch responds by being rather more nuanced, saying that hers and fellow founder Anna de Silva’s, was of an “intuitive” variety which was challenged and strengthened with the arrival of the more explicitly political Vicky Aspinall. Their 1979 eponymous debut album epitomises the stop-start rhythms of post-punk, which sometimes sounds as if it will come to a halt at any moment.

The Raincoats

The Raincoats, photo: Birmingham 81@Birmingham_81

However, it is far from being a shambles, and is an album of pop which is unafraid of being loose and of leaving spaces. Of the many fine tunes, two stand out – Off-Duty Trip, a scathing recount of then current case of a guardsman let off a rape because it would ‘harm’ his career. The other, is a stunning cover of The Kinks' Lola, who "walked like a woman and talked like a man". Sung by the women in The Raincoats the whole nature of the fluidity and social construct of sexuality and gender are explored brilliantly in a catchy pop song.

 Raincoats playing Lola live, with Viv Albertine on backing vocals.

Odyshape moved away from this sound. Using a range of second-hand instruments the band embraced a variety of musical influences as diverse as English folk, world music and our old friend, free jazz. This album and their most accessible release, Moving (1984), combine in a single song elements from around the world, managing to simultaneously float whilst moving in a definite direction. There can be jazz piano alongside Middle Eastern chants and soulful vocals, all at the same time. It sometimes seems as if time and space has been expanded to allow the tunes to breathe. Personally, I think this album is a neglected pop classic. The opening three songs should have been monster chart hits, including the wonderful, No One’s Little Girl:

I’m no one's little girl, oh no, I'm not                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         I'm not gonna be - cause I don't wanna be                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               I never shall be on your family tree.

It’s political! It’s pop!

The Au Pairs

Another album with a striking cover, with music to match, is Playing with a Different Sex (1981) by the Au Pairs, which has an Eve Arnold photograph of Chinese female militia on manoeuvres in Mongolia. This Birmingham band, formed in 1978, produced edgy yet catchy songs with a scratchy, funky edge to them. Songs included brilliantly sarcastic looks at sexual relationships in We’re so Cool and It’s Obvious, and a great cover of David Bowie’s Repetition, dealing with domestic violence. Other topics include Northern Ireland eg Armagh, with its chorus – “we don’t torture, we’re a civilised nation”. This album has well-crafted songs with passion, humour and politics: polemics which are powerful but accessible. Their lead singer, Lesley Woods, their lead singer, has one of the great rock voices.

 The Au Pairs on The Old Grey Whistle Test: Set Up

Perhaps if The Au Pairs had not been political they would have made it big. Or maybe that was denied because Woods was a woman who did not play in the defined roles which the industry demanded. The excellent lecturer and writer, Helen Reddington, has said:

Arguably, if female bands had developed the sort of innovations in music that The Slits and The Raincoats, for instance, made, they would have become household names.

Certainly, a good many of the female (and male) post-punk musicians dropped out of music for many years, some even permanently. Some suffered from mental health issues, perhaps from the pressure and the energy required to swim against the stream. Then again, these were often people who had never intended a career in music, but just needed to create what they wanted - sometimes just one single - and then to stop. Or it might be that by the 80s the music business was taking control: the indie labels were being swallowed up, the rough edges of post-punk were smoothed into new pop, and the rest was discarded.

So what is the relevance of these bands today? Well, firstly of course, there is the fantastic music which they created. If you are unaware of The Slits, Raincoats, Rip, Rig and Panic or The Au Pairs then I suggest you treat yourself. Any list of great albums should include them.

They changed women’s involvement in rock. Viv Albertine in her autobiography says that she had few, if any, women guitarists to emulate. The musicians here - and there were many others - filled that gap and inspired others like the Riot Grrrls to follow in the nineties. Sexist stereotyping of the music industry still exists, and depressingly appears to be going strong, but there are challenges to it. Bands such as Warpaint and The Savages continue the tradition.

Similarly, any list of great political songs should include them alongside the usual entries of sixties protest anthems. They re-energized politics in music, which would continue throughout the eighties and nineties. And whilst bands who are explicitly political are at present rather thin on the ground, benefit concerts for strikes and campaigns are now the norm.

But let me return to the point made at the beginning of this piece. Music, even if not explicitly political, can with its quest to question, challenge and innovate, affect people who listen and enjoy it. For the most part, I have mentioned music which does address political issues but I believe they were able to do so in an atmosphere where such a thing was not seen as odd or unusual. People are drawn into politics by many routes, often by a combination of factors. Art, including music, can be one of them. That was true for me - an important part of my personal political education was as a fifteen year old listening to The Clash, and then having a whole new joyous world opened up by the music from these bands.

 

Thanks to Birmingham 81@Birmingham_81 for the use of his photos of Lesley Wood and The Raincoats.

Sunday, 06 March 2016 18:17

Wearing their politics on their sleeves: Civil Rights and the art of the jazz album cover

Published in Music

The cultural struggle takes many forms, says Phil Brett, and shows us the aesthetically beautiful and politically challenging art to be found on the sleeves of albums made by black jazz musicians..

A journalist from the New Yorker, who was writing a piece on Duke Ellington, heard a white New York cop say to the great band leader, “If you’d been a white man, Duke, you’d have been a great musician.” Such racism wouldn’t have surprised Ellington because he, like other black musicians, experienced it daily – the segregated travel, clubs, seating and even the toilets. Arbitrary stops on the road and general harassment would have been the norm. Of course as well-known musicians they would have ‘enjoyed’ small level of protection which black non-musicians would not have. For them, assault and murder would have been far from unusual. Perhaps, it shows the level of racism in American society that the cop talking to Ellington, was an enthusiastic fan of his!

It would be wrong, however, to see black jazz musicians merely as passive victims, because in a multitude of ways, they made their voice heard in the struggle. After all, Martin Luther King, addressing the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival said that “jazz speaks for life”. Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam, Charlie Parker’s Now’s the Time or John Coltrane’s Alabama certainly spoke up for life - defiantly, angrily and passionately.

 

But the struggle for a better society can take different forms. The civil rights movement included a cultural struggle, which affected not just the music but what it came packaged in – the album covers. Look at these and what do you see?

s ellalouis AllCDCovers miles davis milestones 2001 retail cd front

Your answer will depend on a whole range of factors. John Berger wrote, “The way we see things is affected by what we know or believe.” So take the album cover on the left: if you do not know who they are (there is nothing on the front sleeve to identify them) then they are a black woman and black man sitting on chairs smiling at the camera.

However, the chances are that even if you don’t like jazz, you will recognise Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. That in turn will affect how you see it, including feelings towards their music. But put this album in context: it was released in 1956, less than 12 months after Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat for a white man. What might the reaction have been when seeing it on its release? They look like anyone’s relatives. Their humanity shines through. But of course, knowing who they are adds a twist because they possess such fame that their names are not required on the cover to identify them, and the photographer chosen to take the picture was Phil Stern, the lead photographer for Vogue. They have status. It is an image of positive affirmation, something to rejoice in.

Likewise with the other album cover. You might just see a man wearing a rather cool green shirt. It is indeed a fine shirt. But look at Miles Davis (Milestones, 1958) looking at you. In his autobiography, he wrote that whether on stage or on his record covers, he wanted to break from the image of jazz musician grinning purely for the enjoyment of a white audience because he felt it was demeaning – too much of a throwback to minstrels – so he just looks straight at you.

 our music BackatChickenShack


This same focus is true of Ornette Coleman Quartet, on their This is our Music (1961). In the context of a period of history when black people were expected to get off the pavement and walk in the gutter to allow space for a white person, these photographs suggest that these men wouldn’t in a million years consider doing so.
Jimmy Smith on the cover of Back at the Chicken Shack (1963) is also wearing a pretty damn cool shirt, and trousers with a razor sharp crease. You may say, and so what? Photographed by Francis Wolff and with an album design by Reid Miles (one of a series of iconic albums for the Blue Note label) Smith oozes style, wit and sophistication. Yet this was at a time when politicians and the Ku Klux Klan (often being both one and the same) were violently denying that black people could have any such attributes.

The working class have often used clothes as a form of rebellion, for example Teddy Boys, Mods and Punk Rockers. Here they are a contrast with the location. Smith's urban elan is juxtaposed with a chicken coop, with its echoes of the Deep South. The composition though makes it clear that he is no farm slave, not with that style and that look. The shot is taken from slightly below Smith, so he is looking down on us, the viewer. Here is someone who has pride, someone who is his own master. He is in control. So for the black audience, these were images of self-respect, dignity and independence. For the white audience they were a challenge – do you think these people are not your equals?

weinsist Mohawk

However, affirmation and positive images can only go so far. The civil rights movement was also about direct action, with many in the movement demanding a greater militancy. And so does some of the album covers of the period. Max Roach’s 1960 album We Insist recreates a scene at a lunch counter, the focus of that year’s battleground, with the sit-ins in white-only establishments. The title and image are totally unambiguous. Look at the size of the title – in block letters and with an exclamation mark. It's a demand, not a request. The stridency of the cover perfectly matches the mood of the album which was one of the first jazz albums to directly attack racism. Tracks tackled subjects such as slavery, the Sharpeville Massacre, pride in African nationalism and opposition to the racist Jim Crow laws.

A band which was very much involved in the movement was The New York Art Quartet, a free jazz ensemble who would cause some controversy in their brief existence when they included the incendiary black beat poet LeRoi Jones in some of their performances. On their 1965 album Mohawk, Dutch artist Marte Roling’s witty illustration is similarly direct. In it she features a placard reading ‘Freedom now’ in the cut-away brain. Politics, it suggests, was on everyone’s minds.

archieshepp attica blues impulselp MonkUnderground

Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues (1972) is a reference to the Attica prison riots which occurred when the prisoners rose up demanding better conditions, following the shooting of Black Panther George Jackson in San Quentin jail (one track on the album is called Blues for George Jackson). The sleeve shows Archie Shepp working at a piano, his sax slung across it like it was a rifle. He is flanked by books and images of black heroes, including a poster with the iconic image of the African American Olympic athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 games, giving the Black Power salute on the medal rostrum. The composition of the photograph evokes militancy: a great cover and a great album.

A trussed up Nazi, hand-grenades on the table and a sub-machine gun slung across his back is not quite the scene you’d usually expect from an album by a jazz pianist. But then, this is Thelonious Monk. His 1968 album sleeve for Underground won a Grammy for its design (photography by Norman Griner and supervised by Columbia Records art director, John Berg) but proved to be controversial with some folks. Maybe it was because this was the same year Martin Luther King was been assassinated, sparking riots across major cities in the States. Although the picture is ostensibly a tableau of the French Resistance, people saw allusions closer to home. It wasn’t a great leap of imagination to see the title as being a reference to the nineteenth century abolitionist network – the Underground Railway. Or conflating the resistance to the Nazis with that of resistance to the racist US state. Or perhaps that at the time of the Black Panthers, a picture of a black man carrying a gun was pretty damn frightening to the establishment.

Nina Simone High Priestess of Soul   MilesDavisBitches

The civil rights campaign spawned a greater interest in black history. The Black Arts Movement promoted African-American art and demanded a higher profile for black artists, authors and musicians and black history in general. High Priestess of Soul, Nina Simone’s 1967 album has her as Cleopatra. It, like Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, is an example of how Afro-centrism was influencing 1960s sleeve designs. So whilst fifty years on it may seem a touch cheesy to have Simone as the Egyptian Queen there was however a greater significance beyond wearing fancy dress. (And let’s face it; it is a whole lot less cheesy that the girl from Hampstead, Liz Taylor, who four years earlier had dressed up as Cleopatra). The image here had a clear message – black people, including women, should not be written out of history. Cleopatra, whatever Hollywood might say (and in light of the recent Oscars, it still obviously has issues with race) was a strong black queen, something African-American women could draw strength from.

Both these albums’ designs were overseen by John Berg. The gatefold sleeve has a painting by Abdul Mati Klarwein, with the black African figures in the centre, reflecting the fact that humanity first came from that continent. The double album was one of the first LPs which would be labelled jazz-rock and was a successful attempt to go beyond jazz’s confines and reach the larger rock audience. The artist also provided covers for artists as diverse as Santana and The Last Poets.

Born into a Jewish family in Hamburg in 1932, Klarwein’s mother was an opera singer and his father an architect with the Bauhaus Movement. They fled Germany in 1934 and settled in Palestine. He went on to study with Fernand Leger in Paris and became friendly with Salvador Dali. You can see the surrealism and use of symbolism in his work which derive from these associations. Tellingly, he later added the Muslim name Abdul, which means servant in Arabic, as a statement of his belief that Judaism and Islam needed to understand and respect each other.

OrnetteColemanFreeJazz album mingus ah um

Not everything was figurative though. Elsewhere on this website, Christine Lindey has written how the Russian Revolution gave artists a sense of freedom to explore their art. The civil rights and anti-war movements may have been a less intense class struggle than the Bolshevik Revolution, but they likewise gave space to new artistic and cultural expressions. One grew out of New York, Abstract Expressionism. So it is apt that this 1961 album Free Jazz by Ornette Coleman came in a gatefold sleeve, with a cut-out showing Jackson Pollock’s 1954 drip painting, White Light. Free jazz and modern art – now that’s taking no prisoners! Both art forms were about tearing down conventions and both are here. Berger says of Pollock that his genius was to create a paintings where “continuous surface patterns which are perfectly unified without the use of any obvious motif”. It's a statement which could serve as a good description of Coleman’s music. It gives a sense of freedom in the art, a feeling that Coleman was attempting to achieve with his music, and something which people on the streets, in the schools and in the diners were fighting for.

The sleeve to Mingus Ah Um (1959) is by a Japanese American, Neil Fujita, who was also responsible for another 1950s classic – Dave Brubeck's Time Out. Previous to being a graphic designer he had enlisted in the U.S. Army whilst still having relations in Japan. Which as well as making family gatherings a little tense, might also have given him a sense of being outside the American mainstream. Fujita was also responsible for the paperback cover designs of two books which in different ways would question American values and become immensely popular – Catch 22 and The Godfather.

This marvellous album harks back to the big band sound whilst incorporating the new post-bop. It captures the mood between the certainty of the 1940s and the clear-cut cause of fighting fascism, with the questioning of the 1960s. Who were they fighting now? That sense of in-betweeness is what one gets from looking at the lovely cover, which owes a debt to Miro and Picasso. Look at it at different times and you’ll see something different each time, something which either cannot be articulated or can be so in different ways. Perhaps that grappling for meaning is why Mingus, a highly articulate man, chose an almost nonsensical title. Not that all the album is hidden in codes. There is one track which is very direct – Fables of Faubus. It was written as an explicit protest against Arkansas Governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 sent the National Guard to prevent the integration of nine African-American children into Little Rock Central High School.

There was however a tension in the design for jazz albums which mirrored that of the music itself – what style should they take? A no-nonsense direct approach which confronted the issues head on? But that might alienate audiences, and we should remember that the vast majority of record design teams were white. Or should they play safe with images of the musicians which would make greater commercial sense, and could still make a point with subtlety? The problem was that with the National Guard on the streets, subtlety did not seem an appropriate response. There was nothing subtle about water hoses or police batons. Christine Lindey ends her piece by saying: “the dilemma of creating innovatory art which is accessible to the masses has yet to be resolved”, and this statement is surely true of both album design and jazz music itself.

In jazz music, the cutting edge was seen as free jazz, but as the years rolled on it started to lose its black audience. Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice wrote: “It is the jazz issuing from the friction and harmony of the American Negro with his environment that captured the beat and tempo of our times”. But the fact was that by the mid-sixties many black Americans were moving to a different beat, a soul or funk one. For them the avant-garde of jazz was too abstract, too removed from their daily experiences.

Jazz continues, as does the fight for civil rights, and with the Black Lives Matter campaign for example. As does, even in these digital times, album cover design. However, the albums created by the cross-fertilisation of jazz and civil rights are great examples of music as cultural struggle, with sleeves to match.

 

 

Murder, Mavericks and Marxism
Friday, 22 January 2016 23:33

Murder, Mavericks and Marxism

Published in Fiction

Phil Brett looks analyses crime fiction from a socialist perspective.

You don’t need to be a professor of English to know that crime fiction is very popular at the moment. Look at the W.H Smith top sellers for 2015 and you’ll find eleven out of the twenty are crime/thriller novels; look at the TV schedules and you will see a proliferation of the genre. Through globalisation, the genre’s writers and their investigators, settings and corpses are to be found across the planet. Why is that? Why do people like reading or watching drama where people get murdered (usually in very unpleasant ways)? In particular, why are they popular with socialists, activists and trade unionists? And can the explanation for the boom in Scandinavian crime fiction offer any clues? I asked myself these questions after returning from a local demonstration against a fatal police shooting, only to then settle down to read a crime novel where the hero cop does just such a thing as regularly as he cleaned his teeth. Distrust of the police is high both here and in the States and with a growing number of black people dying at the hands of law enforcement, it is getting even higher. Yet, crime fiction remains very popular, despite the fact that it usually has the police, be they private or state, as the good guys. Being both a socialist and a fan of the genre, I thought I would try to offer a few thoughts on the matter.

Firstly, it might be helpful to define what I see as a crime novel. Writer, H. R. F. Keating, simply defined it as a story with a crime. If that is the case though, Emile Zola’s La Bete Humaine (1890) should be regarded as a crime novel because it includes what today would be regarded as a serial killer, but as much as I love the genre I wouldn’t push my luck by saying the great nineteenth century French novel was a forerunner of the CBS TV series Criminal Minds. To make things simpler in the labyrinth of sub-genres, I will concentrate on works of fiction which have one or more murders at their heart, with the plot revolving around an individual or group of individuals, who may be the police, private detectives or an individual who takes the role of such (such as a journalist) to solve it. For me, that is a detective novel. (A thriller is its noisy more action-packed younger sibling but I will be leaving them to jump across buildings somewhere else). I will however, look at both novels and television because in my opinion they have obviously symbiotic relationship; both feeding off each other and helping to continue the genre’s popularity.

The detective genre has increased its literary status over the years but it is still rather looked down upon; simply the phrase genre fiction can drip with distaste from some; you will rarely see a crime novel in the literary prizes unless they are specifically for crime writers. Yet, ‘serious’ writers such Yeats and Auden have been devotees. Others, such as Martin Amis and Isabel Allende, who do appear in such lists, have tried their hand at writing one for themselves. Frankly they have not been their best work, so it can’t be that easy a form to write in. In the world of genre fiction there has been far more written on science fiction (or future fiction if you prefer) and fantasy. I have friends who passionately argue how such genres can analyse present society and explore future ones whereas crime fiction is simply a formulaic re-enforcement of the status quo. I disagree, but then we could end this all by simply saying that it is all a matter of taste: so to many, a trilogy of novels where small fantasy creatures quest for a ring, are the greatest of all time; to me they are long winded yarns about small fellas with furry feet who take their bleeding time in a narrative which is akin to watching a tin of Dulux getting less wet. But where would be the fun in just calling it personal preference?

The body count mounts up

Of course, not all detective fiction is the same. As mentioned above, here is not the place to explore all the sub and sub-sub genres which multiply by the day (Crime Fiction by John Scaggs is a good introduction for those who are interested) but it is useful to have a quick look at the development of the main strands of the detective novel. Personally, I find Ernest Mandel’s Delightful Murder an excellent starting point for a quick resume.

Being a Marxist, Mandel believed that crime is a product of class society and that the police are a part of the repressive state apparatus. He also believed that there is a relationship between the ideas, and therefore the art, of a society, and the way that society organises itself. In the book he notes the birth of the detective novel coincided with the industrial revolution; with the rapid rise in industrialisation came mass poverty, and a huge disparity of wealth between the haves and have nots. The problem for the ruling class was that whilst they weren’t too bothered by the poor ripping off the poor, it did start to worry them if it threatened their wealth or the production of it. Industrialisation meant collective workplaces which might mean efficient ways of producing profit but it also created a space where people could organise and start to rebel against the appalling exploitation. Something more efficient and reliable was required than what had previously been in operation, so the Bow Street Runners which operated since the mid 1700 were replaced in 1829 by the Metropolitan Police. Crime and punishment became an issue for discussion. And novels.

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 Many point to E.T.A. Hoffman’s novel Mademoiselle de Scuderi (1819) as the first detective novel. In it a Miss Marple -type figure (a hundred years before the venerable woman from St. Mary Mead first made an appearance in print) proves the innocence of the police’s prime suspect. Charles Dickens refers to the police in Oliver Twist (1837) and features a detective, Inspector Bucket, in Bleak House (1852). Dickens is also responsible for what is believed to be one of the first English murder mysteries, the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). The novel though which is credited to be the first English detective novel is Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). One that would set down many of the ground rules of the genre. The writer however who is generally regarded as really starting the whole bloodbath is Edgar Allan Poe. In The Murders of the Rue Morgue (1841) he created detective Auguste Dupin. Dupin, with his astute forensic mind, would be the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic Sherlock Holmes forty-odd years later. The genius detective had arrived. Mandel sees Holmes as the epitome of a bourgeois society that believes that reason is all and if all the rules are followed then all will be well.

With mass literacy, coupled with advancements in printing techniques, the working class could read mass-produced works of fiction, often, as with the case of Dickens and Collins, in comparatively cheap periodicals. Included in which, were these early detective novels. If the social fractures of the industrial revolution created fertile ground for the birth of the detective novel, indeed, the creation of the real detectives themselves (although not quite of the intellectual level of Sherlock), then what followed would give rise to two more. World War One had seen millions suffering a hitherto unknown scale of industrial slaughter on the battlefield, only to be followed by an industrial and financial crash in peace time. The previous norms were challenged and the individual seemed lost in a society in crisis and so two more archetypal individual detectives came into the world - of very different types - but sharing the reassuringly ability to make sense of the puzzle of the world around them. In Britain, Holmes was followed by a host of living room detectives (usually of upper class or upper-middle class status) in what has been called the Golden Age of Detective Fiction [which is usually defined as being in the twenties and thirties], with writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and the best-selling author of all time, Agatha Christie. The detectives created here, such as Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion and Hercule Poirot still continue to be popular, with many a hard-pressed Sunday night TV producer finding employment for actors who can talk toff or act serving afternoon tea.

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At the same time across the Atlantic, a more rugged individualism appeared with the hard-boiled detective novels such as The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett with Sam Spade and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939) setting the scene for the classic private eye. Like Dickens, both Hammett and Chandler started writing in periodicals, which both gave them a chance for publication and access to a mass market. For them, analysing clues and solving puzzles were not as important as interviewing suspects (often with a slap or two) and drinking whisky. Miss Marples they ain’t. Mandel makes the point that these are transitional detectives: unlike the majority of the Golden Age detectives, they are people who have to work for a living and work from an office. What they do have in common with their English country house cousins is the fact that they are tracking individuals and not criminal organisations, a task which clearly they are not suited to. With the rise of organised crime, would come yet another new type of detective, the police procedural.

The horror of World War Two would also lengthen the rope required for the suspension of disbelief for the comfortable English county home murder mystery. Not that it was killed off, the omnipresent detective, be they in the oak panelled library; walking the streets of LA or working in the police station remained (and remains) popular, perhaps even reassuring. Edmund Wilson writing in 1944 found it a relief that someone knew what was going on in a world gone mad. Maybe that was one of the reasons for the rise after the war of two more of the giants of hard-boiled detective fiction, Ross Macdonald and Chester Himes. But society needed more than clever individuals for controlling discontents so what took central place was detective fiction where the main protagonist was a part of a team. Detective novels, like all literature, feeds off itself and so includes in its ranks Charles Dicken’s Inspector Bucket and Nagio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn, as well as Ruth Rendall’s Wexford, Colin Dexter’s Morse, Henning Mankell’s Wallender, P.D James’ Adam Dalgliesh and many many more, all supping cold tea in that busy fictional police station.

From these, have sprung a multitude of sub-genres. Such a variety is not solely down to the author’s (or TV script writer’s) imagination but also the growth of technology. Mandel cites the advent of photography and the telephone as having an important effect on real and fictional crime-fighting. But published back in 1984, he skips over the growth of forensic science (DNA for example), surveillance or the internet. These have created new stories or at the very least, new elements, of old narratives. One example will suffice: the CBS series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation follows a Las Vegas forensic team who solve murders using science. As a part of a team they belong to the police procedural, however, as critic Scaggs discusses, the lead criminologist Gil Grissom, is an outsider, with an incredible brain stuffed with knowledge – not unlike one Sherlock Holmes.

The evidence

One obvious reason for the genre’s success is that there is some good stuff out there. This is not to say that there is not crap as well in the crime section. There certainly is. But there have been works of obvious literary merit. Those who argue that the detective novel is all plot and no narrative may have the point with Christie but with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) or Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992)? The detective novel can be literary enough to satisfy a variety of needs. Locations can be conjured up effectively as any worthy prize winner. P. D James for one, paints believable and gripping settings, such as the nursing school in Shroud for a Nightingale (1971); what about Peter Robinson’s Yorkshire Dales or Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh or Tudor London in C.J Sansom’s Shardlake series?

Characterisation can be as strong as anything in mainstream fiction, sometimes achieved with just one sentence. Here’s Philip Marlowe in Farewell My Lovely (1940) meeting someone with a rather unfortunate body odour; but then “an occasional whiff of personality drifted back to me”. Or Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1953) expounding his philosophy on the world, “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set yourself”. Jean-Paul Sartre, eat your heart out! Other writers spend almost as much care on the characterisation as they do on the murder case. For example, look at Henning Mankell’s Swedish detective Wallender, who in addition to solving murder cases copes with his father’s dementia (which he himself also gets) and his daughter’s resentment. The first series of Danish TV’s The Killing (2007) had each episode covering twenty-four hours in the investigation of the murder of Nanna Birk Larson, allowing time for the drama to explore the grief of the parents of the murdered woman.

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The crime TV series (Morse, Murder One, The Wire, The Bridge, Spiral) also boast fine acting and have high production values. They treat the audience with respect and as intelligent beings who are able to understand a narrative with many strands, which takes time to evolve. Detective fiction can have humour, tragedy (well I guess it needs that) and hope. Because of one success, businesses with all the imagination that ageing capitalism can muster, tend to want copy it. Before 1962 record companies were all looking for the next Elvis; after, the next Beatles (we will not dare ponder if now, God help us, it is the next Justin Bieber). The same applies to detective fiction. With the success of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) Nordic Noir boom really took off. Everyone was looking for the next Larsson. But it is not solely one big conspiracy, it seems reasonable that if you have read one particular type of novel or seen a TV series which you enjoyed then it is logical to try another one.

Blood stains

One popular theory is that we enjoy detective fiction because we all enjoy violence and it is a vicarious thrill to read or watch it (Mandel considered this to be an innocent pursuit – it being better to read about violence that practise it). Now it is true that in your average Agatha Christie it is like a war zone on a bad day, but they tend to be almost bloodless deaths; the point is to find the killer and not to revel in the gore. Authors such as Jo Nesbo and Mark Billingham do have graphic scenes but I don’t think they are there primarily for some kind of thrill. For starters, the internet has far worse. When I was a public librarian in north London, I saw hundreds of people borrow detective novels, amongst whom many were pensioners, and they did not strike me as wannabe homicidal killers. (Apart from on the occasions when we forgot to put the daily newspapers out). I think it is a far too negative view of humanity. Maybe such horror, if I can steal from Terry Eagleton’s discussion of tragedy in Sweet Violence (2002), helps meet certain emotional and psychological needs by confronting our fears and nightmares. There can be no doubt however that there is an issue concerning the level of violence against women included in the genre; the vast majority of the victims are female. How does that sit with the genre’s popularity with the population, including and perhaps especially, with those who consider themselves socialists?

Identity

There are some novels and television series, including the detective, where the depiction of women is sexist and where the violence is gratuitous, that cannot, should not, be denied or passed over. But is it central to the detective genre? It is perhaps instructive to look at the publishing sensation which is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Disturbing sexual violence is present in all the books of the Millennium Trilogy. What happens to Lisbeth Salander is appalling, but is the reader invited to see her as a victim or as a fighter? Do we not cheer when she gets revenge? The author, Stieg Larsson, by all accounts was on the left and originally the book was called Men who hate Women which seems an obvious sign of his allegiances. What complicates it further however is the story which writer and critic, Barry Forshaw relates about an interview with Larsson’s father, who said that he had complained to his son that there was too much sex in the book, to which Stieg replied that it was commercially important.

This does hint that an essential part of the modern detective novel is sex, if that is so, then does that include sexual violence, specifically against women? With that question comes quickly a second: if so, why there are so many women readers and why there are so many female detective writers? Novelist Melanie McGrath sees it as no big mystery, because it gives women, “permission to touch on our own decorous feelings of rage, aggression and vengefulness, sentiments we’re encouraged to pack away.” Paula Hawkins in the Guardian, whilst discussing the success of the Girl on the Train (2015) writes that such books show “a desire among readers for stories that speak to their experiences.” Val McDermid (who herself has been criticised for sexual violence) says simply that the reason for so many great female writers is that, “Women are better at scaring us.”

I also think another reason for the macabre deaths is the distrust of the police. The maverick detective who ‘plays by their own rules’ is a staple of the genre yet the reader or viewer need to be able to overcome their opposition to the real-life police who do that. With cops in the real world killing people because of their colour of their skin or ignoring sexual violence there has to be a good reason to support, even cheer on, officers who break laws, doors or jaws in fiction; a purloined letter is not going to do that, capturing a sadistic torturer will. In the real world people see millions stolen by multi-nationals and the very rich go unpunished for non-payment of taxes or even theft, yet a family in a bedsit will be hounded for a minor infringement of their benefits; they see the justice system’s connivance in this bias. They need an incentive to support that system.

This has also given rise to fiction which is either centred on the criminal(s) themselves [for example, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969)] or where the reader/viewer has split loyalties. From many examples, I would pick the first HBO TV series of The Wire (2002), regarded by many as the greatest television series of all time (I’d probably be one of those), which pitted the Baltimore police department against the drug dealing Barksdale family, as a fine example of this.

In a situation of distrust of the establishment, even those stories featuring officers who behave well need to motivate the reader/viewer to be on their side. Here we have the troubled but sensitive individual detective, who may be in a team but is not really a creation of it. P.D James’ Dalgliesh is a poet and Dexter’s Morse is a sensitive, intellectual, loving opera and the classics equally. Paul Foot pondered the popularity of Morse and considered him to be, “most people’s role model of what a policeman/detective ought to be like.” The key word is ought. Terry Eagleton writing about the quirkiness of some of Dickens’ characters says, “You cannot have deviation without the norm”, comparing Fagin to Oliver Twist. So the reader/viewer warms to the detective because they are the ‘characters’ who are surrounded by mundanity and ineffectiveness. The norm in these books/TV series isn’t how Marxists view the police, as class oppressors, but simply as being dull and unimaginative. The reader/viewer supports the investigator as an individual, not the state institution.

I, like many others, read detective fiction because I like, to use a hideous piece of management jargon, the goal-driven structure of it (which for some is the very reason to hate it). Right from the start, to solve the puzzle has been the central thread of the genre. The American Golden Age crime writer, S.S Van Dine, saw it as much as a sporting competition as an intellectual challenge and compiled a much quoted set of rules which the genre must adhere to for it to be a fair contest. I am not interested, and do not like, graphic scenes of violence for their own sake, but catching a serial killer adds a greater challenge, a greater urgency, to finding a solution. For in the crime novel, unlike life under capitalism, the best brains and the best people tend to win.

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Many of the victims are female but there are also many female writers and female detectives; and some combining both. These include giants of the genre: Sue Grafton with private eye Kinsey Millhone; Sara Peretksy with V.I Warshawski, Patricia Cornwall with medical examiner Kay Scarpetta or Val McDermid with Kate Brannigan. The list of female detective writers is long and rich. With a female detective working in a male dominated world, sexism cannot but be addressed. The ITV 1990’s ITV series Prime Suspect written by Lynda La Plante is one such example, centred not just on DCI Jane Tennison hunting a murderer but also confronting the sexism in her team. Grafton and Peretsky subvert the macho hard-boiled PI genre to question social and cultural values, a similar aspect can be seen in La Plante’s police procedural.

Heather Worthington in Key Concepts of Crime Fiction (2011) writes that, “Crime fiction offers a contained and containing world in which contemporary cultural and social anxieties can be explored”. This includes gender and sexual orientation. Again, from Worthington, “McDermid has openly stated that her serial amateur detective, Lindsay Gordon, was part of a wider project to introduce an openly homosexual character into mainstream fiction and so normalise gay and lesbian sexuality.”

One should also add race. Again, even if it is not the main issue, having a black detective operating in a racist society throws up all sorts of issues. The BBC series Luther, which has Idris Elba in magnificent form playing DCI John Luther is respected by his team (and the viewers) is not primarily about racism but the character’s dedication, which is clearly damaging him, cannot be but a positive image.

 Chester Himes wrote a series of cracking novels in the late 1950s featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones as Harlem detectives. Although not overtly political, Himes didn’t ignore racism in the books (Himes himself had experienced racism first hand, which even his fame did not protect him from) but did so by the placement of black cops enforcing white laws in black Harlem. Walter Mosley with his 1990 novel, Devil in a Blue Dress introduced Easy Rawlins who by the end of the novel has become a LA private detective.

Chetsre Himes

The series of novels featuring the private investigator reboots the hard-boiled genre to explore the African-American experience in the post-war years. All in all, it makes the fictional cop-world far more inclusive than the real.

In the DNA

So as we’ve seen the detective novel can be more than a dead body in the library. Worthington, I think describes the genre’s contradictions well: “Crime fiction is at once deeply conservative in its formulaic conventions and yet potentially radical in its diversity. What seems simple is, in fact complex. The genre offers new and exciting insights into the cultures that produce it; its very status as popular and accessible literature means that it responds quickly to change.” Looking at that quote, words such radical, diversity, cultures and change jump out and offer good reasons why many a socialist enjoys a good detective novel.

Many have written them. Even in what may seem to be the most conservative of sub-genres, the Golden Age of Detectives, sitting by Dorothy L Sayers et al, there can be found one author who died in the Spanish Civil War fighting Franco (Christopher St. John Spriggs), British Communist Party Members, cabinet ministers of Clement Atlee post-war Labour Government (Ellen Wilkinson) and the wife of one of Stalin’s commissars (Ivy Low, married Maxim Litvinov, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs). Indeed, look at any of the era of the detective novel and you’ll find lefties. Dashiell Hammett for example, was a member of American Communist Party and in many of his novels, alongside witty dialogue and snappy characterisation, there are barbs at the American way of life. Ross Macdonald used his Lew Archer novels to highlight the corruption of the Californian myth of wealth and sunshine for all; or in other words, the local American Dream. Ten novels featuring detective Martin Beck by Marxists Per Wahoo and Maj Sjowall use cracking stories to counter the perception of Sweden as a democratic socialist paradise.            

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Generally, the criticisms of society or structures of society, are reformist rather than revolutionary: the faults can be rectified; the wrongs will be of a single incident of crime rather than its causes. The disease of corruption might not be cured but the temperature lessened. Sometimes what is at fault is the national state or the system but usually it is localised power, or it’s a corporation, or an individual who is in the wrong. But no matter what type of detective, or how damaged they might be, they all want justice. Paretsky for example has said, that it was essential that V.I Warshawski was female because hers would be a sensibility which said, “What is wrong in people’s lives and what should we do to fix it, not how many people can I blow away and look really tough and cool?”

Northern Lights

What is wrong in people’s lives is, I believe, an important part of the popularity of the Scandinavian crime writers, collectively known as Nordic Noir. Swedish author Liza Marklund for example, echoes Paretsky in citing the presence of “strong female heroines – who have actually behave like real women”. You can see that with Saga Noren (played by Sofia Helin) in Danish/Swedish TV series The Bridge, Sarah Lund (played by Sofie Grabol) in Swedish TV series The Killing or Rebecka Martinsson in Asa Larsson’s books. The stories may at first appear to be gloomy but people care about each other; they have real problems. Also, in many of them, there are no easy answers; there isn’t a sense of redemption and good triumphing over evil. It is more complex than that, indeed sometimes major characters are killed off. The form demands a result but not necessarily a total resolution.

Social comment is also often little disguised. Mention has already been made of Stieg Larsson and Sjowall & Wahloo, but there are many others. One could add Arne Dahl exploring the public rage against banks, or Mari Jungstedts’ view of a corrupted society or Marklund’s investigative reporter Annika Bengtzon who deals with such themes as domestic abuse or most obviously, Henning Mankell’s novels. One such example is Faceless Killers (1997) which highlights the racism in Sweden’s seemingly liberal society, now especially apt with the country closing its borders to refugees. Such corruption appears to us all the more shocking because many people have a perception of the region of having, in writer and journalist, Solomon Hughes’ glorious phrase, “weak-tea social democracy”. Or as Norwegian author, Thomas Enger, eloquently says, “The eruption of violence for instance, somehow seems more shocking in this more carefully controlled setting”. With the assassination of Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden, in 1986 and the Minister of Foreign affairs, Anna Lindh, in 2003, not to mention the massacre of 77 people by Anders Breivik in 2011, any notion of the region being a utopia has been seriously dented.

However, many people look at their society and their health care, or housing and education policy and find ours wanting. It still appears to be more shocking to read about drug gangs in Oslo than it does in LA, or even London. It also occurs to me that for Marxists, or simply just those people with a healthy questioning attitude to society, the reaction might not be that it is a surprise that it happens there but rather that it is confirmation that crime, corruption and alienation accompany capitalist societies - including those dressed up in liberal social democracy.

Of course, the fact of there is something new to exploit, to feed a large market, or the cashing in on success, plays a part (Ian Rankin has been quoted as saying, “Scandinavian crime writers are not better than Scottish ones, they just have better PR”). Or it could be that the crap stuff hasn’t been translated. Its location at the top of Europe could also be important: being near enough for us to recognise but different enough to interest. The cold vast landscape intrigues, entices but also frightens us. Or maybe that’s just soft, urban me.

Icelandic writer Ysra Sigurdardottir uses the desolate northeast of Greenland in the Day is Dark (2011) to such an effect. These are places which are made for dark tales of murder, revenge and betrayal. There is a reminder of the Western, of the individual on the frontier, which itself had so influenced the hard-boiled detective writers. Rebecka Martinson for example has a bolt-hole in Kiruna, Sweden’s northern most town. The cities can be recast in a bleaker, almost black and white picture, making it more noir than the reality.

Bringing to justice

I have not for a second meant to argue that all crime fiction is fantastic or that there is not some truly awful and/or reactionary stuff out there. I’ve read some of it. Nor is this meant to be one of those facile popular novelist Z is better than Tolstoy type pieces. But as Hughes puts it, “Once you write about crime, you are writing about the rules of society”. Whatever the writers personally feel about those rules, the contradictions of society cannot be completely hid. Whatever the intention, the nature and the purpose of the rules often are laid bare.

Returning to Mandel again, he places the popularity of the crime novel as a response to our intellectual alienation, of the monotonous drudgery of working for a system based on profit rather than need, so a fictional work where the intellect is tested and some kind of justice is achieved is rewarding. Nick Elliot, once head of BBC Drama, wrote of crime fiction that it “satisfies in us a secret yearning for justice, the unappeasable appetite for a fair world”. Although for those on the left I would say that it is hardly secret, but yelled from the rooftops.

Leon Trotsky may not have been talking of crime fiction when he said, “Generally speaking, art is an expression of man’s need for a harmonious world and complete life, that is to say his need for those major benefits of which society has deprived him” but surely we can find a reason for these stories within it? People are not fools; we recognise that these are not true depictions of law and order. We recognise that they are not documentaries of a fair world. We may sometimes want to escape into a world where the detective temporarily achieves a redress against wrong, but to do so permanently in the real one, we need more than the skill of an individual, we need the intellect, power and creativity of a whole class.
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