Hey, hey, hey, Mark B. You can't shut down this thread before
I have a chance to re-enter the fray.
I agree pretty much entirely with what you have to say about
serial killers in hardboiled fiction and have said similar
things in the past. I'm right with you in thinking that
serial killer books are closer to cozies than hardboiled or
noir. Instead of looking at real people who commit murder for
real reasons, they handily isolate evil in one person, the
serial killer; when that one person is caught, society is
again whole and rational. By adding the trait of psycho-
and/or socio-pathy, the killer is defined as outside of
society. To me, HB and noir contain elements of indictment
about society as a whole -- the evil cannot be
isolated.
That said, I believe serial killer books should be separated
into two categories -- those in the relatively new, separate
genre of serial killer books, of which Thomas Harris would
probably be the exemplar and hardboiled murder mysteries
where the killer turns out to be a serial killer (almost
every recent series of any length has at least one). It is
this latter category that I find particularly tiresome, most
guilty of the evils Mark B claims, of using crazy as an
excuse for sloppiness.
In addition, you can sometimes, too late, find yourself
reading a serial killer book against your will since these
are often advertised as PI or cop books, Mark is right that I
would have been pretty pissed if the killer in LA Requiem had
been a serial killer. Still, I must admit I still found the
quick gloss over the killer's psychopathology pretty
inconsistent, one of my few reservations about a book I liked
overall.
These inconsistencies also appear in Serial Killer novels,
per se. (At least these are labelled as such, though, so
those of us who aren't fans can avoid them.) Before I am
dismissed for not knowing what I'm talking about, I've read a
number of the standards, even enjoyed some of them -- Red
Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, Killing Time, one Sandford, one
Carol O'Connell, couldn't make it all of the way though a Rex
Miller (how in the world could Harlan Ellison, who picketed
against Brian DePalma's depiction of women give the vilely
misogynistic Rex Miller a positive blurb?); and I've seen
films of more -- Kiss the Girls and a whole bunch of made for
cable movies, for instance.
Even in Harris's books, with his reams of research, the
accurate particulars of physical evidence and the hints at
psychological depth
(by the way, Dahmer could not have been an inspiration of
Silence as the book came out before he was caught) serve to
hide that some overriding facts about serial killers are
wrong or, at least, exaggerated (as per Robert Ressler and
John Douglas, the two profilers who taught Harris everything
he knew about serial killers) -- they do have motive, just a
twisted one, but more importantly for these fictional
portrayals, they are driven, they kill by compulsion. This is
quite unlike anti-heroes like Hannibal Lecter and any number
of other fictional super-serial killers who are depicted as
free, unbound by society's rules and laws
(and, too often, fiction's rules of motivation and internal
consistency). And this is way I again say these are actually
gothic tales. The fictional serial killer is actual just a
vampire, with all of the inherent romantic overtones, the too
seldom lipservice to compulsion substituting for the trials
of being undead. I don't think it's any coincidence that
serial killers rose in popularity at the same time as Anne
Rice and her followers. It must answer a need in many
contemporary readers.
And, no, I do not mean to restart the thread about the
overlap of horror and HB. I'm pointing out the innate
differences.
Mark S
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