Re: RARA-AVIS: Re: Moratorium on serial murderer mysteries?

From: Craig Clarke (craigsbookclub@yahoo.com)
Date: 19 Aug 2010

  • Next message: Randy Krbechek: "RARA-AVIS: Geoffrey Homes - "They Made Me a Killer""

    I found Red Dragon far superior to Silence of the Lambs in this respect.

    Michael Slade's Headhunter is also a good one in giving the first-person account from the POV of the killer. It also keeps the killer's true identity a secret, which leads to a real shocker of an ending! Slade (in all of his/their manifestations) has not reached the heights of this debut since.

    Craig Clarke http://somebodydies.blogspot.com

    >
    >The strength of COLLECTOR and RED DRAGON (another Harris title, which I think
    >is also an excellent representative of this subgenre, of which I agree there are
    >
    >damn few) are that they don't "explain" the killer's behavior, even as they
    >present a full and vivid first-person account of it. We learn the killer's own
    >justification and analysis of what he's doing, much as we do in THE KILLER
    >INSIDE ME and other Thompson works, and that justification is just skewed enough
    >
    >to provide tension between what is happening and what he says about it. That
    >tension, with the hyper-logical but still off-center observations of the killer,
    >
    >in the hands of a great writer, can carry a book. It's the killer's mind that
    >intrigues us, not the killings, which is where a lot of these fall short. (I
    >haven't read I WAS DORA SUAREZ yet but I can't help but think that Derek Raymond
    >
    >would nail this.)
    >
    >
    >More importantly, perhaps, the really good books in this genre show how
    >eminently human the killers are while still being clearly strange, and don't
    >make them out simply to be monsters to be slain by the white knight. I remain
    >chagrined at how many crime novels reduce to a retelling of St. Michael vs.
    >Lucifer or St. George vs. The Dragon. (Or Dudley Do-Right vs. Snidely
    Whiplash.)
    >
    >So-called profiling pretends to explain, and though interesting for a few books

    >as a plot device because the science was relatively new, it grew stale precisely
    >
    >because it put the behavior in a box and made it safe for the squeamish. And
    >profiling, like a lot of financial planning, relies on what has happened before

    >to predict what will happen again -- which is of course true of a lot of forms
    >of inquiry, but remains the equivalent of driving down the highway while looking
    >
    >in the rearview mirror.
    >
    >David Corbett
    >www.davidcorbett.com
    >
    >[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
    >
    >
    >

          



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 19 Aug 2010 EDT