{"id":1939,"date":"2011-12-31T20:42:49","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T20:42:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=1939"},"modified":"2018-10-21T16:56:24","modified_gmt":"2018-10-21T16:56:24","slug":"unsworth-and-waites","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=1939","title":{"rendered":"Unsworth and Waites"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe terror of the truth\u201d: the Gothic Noir of Cathi Unsworth and Martyn Waites<\/span><\/h3>\n

Martyn Waites,\u00a0Speak No Evil\u00a0(Pocket Books, 2009)<\/a><\/p>\n

Cathi Unsworth,\u00a0Bad Penny Blues\u00a0(Serpent’s Tail, 2009)<\/a><\/p>\n

Lee Horsley, Lancaster University<\/p>\n

What you said about real crime fiction is what I passionately believe to be true \u2013 what Cookie [Derek Raymond] taught me about the Black Novel. To quote him: \u2018Black writers are prepared to strip off the temptation to hide from the terror of the truth. Such people are few; they have understood that it is not enough to describe an act of wanton brutality, that the challenge lies in the analysis of real-life horror.\u2019 (Cathi Unsworth in conversation with Martyn Waites<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Martyn Waites\u2019\u00a0Speak No Evil<\/em>\u00a0and Cathi Unsworth\u2019s\u00a0Bad Penny Blues<\/em>\u00a0are novels that involve the reader in scenes of intense psychological torment. As narratives of serial murder, they inevitably represent the infliction of physical violence. The strongest impact, however, is generated by immersing readers in the mental and emotional anguish of characters confronting such \u201creal-life horrors\u201d. Waites and Unsworth produce their own distinctive versions of what Raymond called \u201cthe Black Novel\u201d \u2013 noir that doesn\u2019t \u201chide from the terror of truth\u201d. The result is the creation of thrillers that are haunting, absorbing and unsentimental excursions to the dark, corrupt, cruel side of British society.<\/p>\n

The use of words like \u201chorror\u201d and terror\u201d has strongly Gothic connotations. Gothic and noir have historically been closely allied, but in much contemporary noir crime fiction, the distinctive themes and tropes of the Gothic have become increasingly central. Writers have probed in more unsettling ways the inescapable pressure of the past upon present; extreme states of psychological disturbance, guilt and obsession; the erosion of boundaries between the rational and irrational. The power of Waites\u2019\u00a0Speak No Evil<\/em>\u00a0and Unsworth\u2019s\u00a0Bad Penny Blues<\/em>\u00a0is often very much to do with the representation of nightmare visions, embodiments of deep psychic distortions that cannot easily be laid to rest by rational explanation. As Waites\u2019 child murderess, Anne Marie Smeaton, says, \u201c\u2019I never saw horror films when I was little\u2026I just lived in one.\u2019\u201d In their crimeculture interview, both Waites and Unsworth connect the nature of their fiction to actual experiences of the intrusion of the uncanny. They talk of \u201cpsychogeographic dreams and experiences\u201d that seemed \u201cto go beyond coincidence,\u201d raising the question of whether we can \u201ctap into the resonances that others have left when they departed this world in a traumatic way\u201d.<\/p>\n

The idea of a potent \u201cpsychogeography\u201d is important to both novels. Uncanny experiences are inextricably rooted in fear-laden places. What Unsworth calls \u201cconnections and weird coincidences\u201d emanate from them.\u00a0Bad Penny Blues<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Speak No Evil\u00a0<\/em>vividly conjure up time and place, developing layered, nuanced images of the sites of crimes. In Waites\u2019 novel, doomed characters pick their way fearfully through the debris, the graffiti and broken glass, the \u201chuman hyena howls\u201d of the run-down, maze-like estate. A boy about to die is lost where \u201cThere was no light, only darkness and shadows,\u201d in a no man\u2019s land that seems to inflict damage on anyone who lingers there.<\/p>\n

Unsworth\u2019s depiction of London is less unrelieved, but equally disquieting.\u00a0Bad Penny Blues<\/em>\u00a0is a meticulously researched recreation of metropolitan British society as it was in the early \u201860s \u2013 and as a crucible for all that has come after. She spent, she says, \u201ctwo years living in a time tunnel of 1959-65.\u201d Early \u201860s Soho is captured in all its heady, jostling excitement: Teddy Boys, beats, bohemians, artists, writers, fashion designers, jazz musicians \u2013 but also gangsters, crooked cops, degenerate aristocrats and psychotic killers. As we move through the sharply realised London streets, we see more and more telltale connections. What Waites says in interview of the best crime fiction is true of both Unsworth\u2019s novel and his own: they pull together \u201call the occult strands and hidden histories, the things polite society would prefer were lost forever\u201d and reveal to readers \u201cthe dark, beating heart of our society.\u201d<\/p>\n

In their explorations of the irrational, internal experiences of their central characters, Waites and Unsworth keep readers attuned to the troubling disjunction between resistant exteriors and the underlying realities of \u201cthe dark, beating heart\u201d. Plots turn on the extreme difficulty of knowing what it is that lies under surfaces. Waites\u2019 novel juxtaposes two quests. In the background, there is the continuing story of his series protagonist, Donovan, and his obsessive search for his missing son. It is an investigation that involves long hours of staring at a computer screen which shows only the blank exterior of a house: the building may simply contain a family that has adopted an orphan; or it may contain the perverse cruelty of a couple who have abducted a child and held him captive. At the core of the main narrative there is an analogous difficulty in penetrating beneath an unyielding surface. Donovan\u2019s commission to write a book based on interviews with Anne Marie Smeaton is repeatedly thwarted by her unwillingness or inability to talk fully about her childhood crime and its consequences. Trying to gain her trust enough for her to expose her repressed memories and hidden terrors is, for Donovan, like confronting the locked door of the house that\u2019s under surveillance: \u201cWe\u2019ve only skimmed the surface.\u201d It\u2019s only at the very end that he begins to understand her inner demons, \u201cthe ghosts of the dead and the damned\u201d that mass \u201cbehind her sleeping eyes\u2026ambush her dreams, control her mind. Push through to the waking world, dragging their evil and madness with them.\u201d We don\u2019t know, until the final pages, the status of the tormentors that haunt Anne Marie\u2019s dreams. Like Donovan, we struggle to interpret the significance of her blackouts, her bloody hands and her connection to a series of brutally murdered boys.<\/p>\n

Unsworth juxtaposes the external and the internal in ways that more radically destabilise our sense of what is rationally possible. As in Waites, what is known and visible is that there has been a series of vicious killings \u2013 in\u00a0Bad Penny Blues<\/em>, of call girls whose deaths are loosely based on the unsolved Jack the Stripper murders of the mid-1960s. In Unsworth\u2019s novel, these murders are investigated by Pete Bradley, a young PC of intelligence and integrity, determined to solve the crimes but able see only disconnected, uncommunicative pieces of evidence. His first contact with the case comes when he finds the tiny, crushed body of a woman on a riverbank, her dress savagely ripped, looking like a \u201cbroken doll\u201d. Bradley ponders the conviction that \u201cyou could catch the image of the murderer in the lens of the victim\u2019s eye.\u201d He wants desperately \u201cto have some kind of communion with her, some kind of insight into what it was she saw, who it was that had done this to her. But there was no expression left. Her eyes were glazed.\u201d As time passes, he pieces together other evidence, but the true possibility of communion with the victims is available only to Stella, an artist-turned-fashion designer who is tormented by nightmares about the terrors of the dead women. She feels that she is \u201csuspended between the two worlds of waking reality and nightmarish vision\u201d: in her dream of the first of the victims, \u201cI couldn\u2019t make out where she ended and I began, her thoughts and memories had been so strong that they seemed as if they were my own. But they were so terrible, so alien, so shocking\u2026and most of all, that overwhelming sense of fear\u2026\u201d Even when the nightmare seems to \u201cfracture and dissolve\u201d she feels it often has a reality more intense than that of her own life; she is unsure whether \u201cit had been a horribly vivid dream\u201d or an actual \u201cinsight into a world I didn\u2019t want to see again.\u201d It is an experience so harrowing that she consults a spiritualist, whose explanation \u2013 that \u201cThe murdered women screamed out for help and you picked up their cries\u201d \u2013 carries great conviction. Stella has been attuned to the wavelength of \u201cthe SOS signal\u201d in ways that can never be wholly rationalised.<\/p>\n

The victims in Unsworth\u2019s novel live their final hours in ignorance of the forces propelling them towards their fates. They have terrible premonitions of death, but it is visited on them by powers beyond their comprehension. Death approaches as \u201ca pair of headlights in a long black car.\u201d The window winds slowly down, but the faces of the assailants are \u201clost in the shadows\u201d. The car that repeatedly heralds death in Stella\u2019s visions is an opaque surface, a repository of untold secrets, metaphoric of a power structure that is seemingly unassailable, secure and indifferent to the fates of those who live on the edges of society.<\/p>\n

For both Waites and Unsworth, these Gothic visions make readers feel the horrors of a society that pursues personal position and self-gratification at any cost. Their themes are corrupt privilege, class relations, the lies and evasions that maintain the power structure, and the routine exploitation of the powerless. They are dedicated to exposing the violence committed by those who are in control: as Anne Marie says in\u00a0Speak No Evil<\/em>,\u00a0evil is generated by people who \u201churt the powerless ones\u2026make\u2026helpless people do what they want. Just because they can.\u201d In his conversation with Unsworth, Waites comments on the influence of writers like Sillitoe, with his portrayals of society \u201cfrom the bottom up\u201d. It is, Waites argues, the way that good crime fiction must develop: \u201cif you want to write crime fiction with any degree of connection to the society we\u2019re living in you\u2019re going to be writing a novel that examines the society that produced it.\u201d To accomplish this, Waites and Unsworth believe, is to share the agenda of Derek Raymond\u2019s \u2018Black Novel\u2019, and this is a tradition that both writers carry forward with great energy and conviction, in novels that persuade us and compel our attention from start to finish: \u201c\u2018The Black Novel\u2019 [Raymond] called it, is an urgent enquiry into the shit state of the world and the rotters than run it, with endless compassion for the victims, the forgotten and marginalised whom he wished to give a voice to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read Cathi Unsworth and Martyn Waites in conversation with one another in\u00a0the Crimeculture April Interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2010 by Lee Horsley<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe terror of the truth\u201d: the Gothic Noir of Cathi Unsworth and Martyn Waites Martyn Waites,\u00a0Speak No Evil\u00a0(Pocket Books, 2009)<\/p>\n

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