{"id":326,"date":"2014-03-31T22:06:36","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T22:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/?p=326"},"modified":"2014-05-14T23:11:15","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T23:11:15","slug":"jenny-lawns-take-on-the-golden-age-of-nz-crime-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/2014\/03\/31\/jenny-lawns-take-on-the-golden-age-of-nz-crime-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Jenny Lawn’s take on the golden age of NZ crime fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bloody, funny – the golden age of NZ crime fiction<\/h1>\n
\n
\"Dr<\/a>

Dr Jenny Lawn, from Massey University\u2019s School of English and Media Studies.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Blood-soaked with a vein of humour. These are the distinctive features of home grown crime fiction, which has soared in popularity over the past two decades, says an academic who\u2019s read most of it.<\/p>\n

In fact the past 20 years have been dubbed \u2018the golden age of Kiwi crime fiction\u2019 by Massey University New Zealand literature expert, Dr Jenny Lawn, who has just penned a chapter on recent trends for a forthcoming edition of the\u00a0Oxford History of the Novel\u00a0<\/em>(Oxford University Press).<\/p>\n

Having ploughed through over 40 blood-drenched, sinister-themed books by 20 authors, she is struck by the \u201csheer proliferation\u201d of crime fiction here.<\/p>\n

Before Paul Thomas, who started to publish in the 1990s, our main crime detective writer was Ngaio Marsh. \u201cNobody came close to equalling Ngaio Marsh in terms of success except for [the late] Laurie Mantell,\u201d says Dr Lawn, who teaches New Zealand literature and media studies papers at Massey\u2019s Auckland campus.<\/p>\n

Mantell, who worked as an accountant in Lower Hutt and died aged 93 in 2010, wrote five detective novels in the late 1970s and early 1980s all set in and around Wellington, and had an international following. Marsh, on the other hand, was an anglophile who set the majority of her 32 novels in Britain.<\/p>\n

Paul Cleave, New Zealand\u2019s most internationally acclaimed crime writer since Ngaio Marsh, has an international following in France and the United States. His first book\u00a0The Cleaner<\/em>\u00a0(2006) has sold over a quarter of a million copies.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of Cleave\u2019s seven novels are set in his home city of Christchurch, which breeds evil as refuse breeds flies: the picturesque Avon River is a cesspit of urine, weed, and used condoms; the Port Hills are regularly cordoned off where \u2018some poor kid is being peeled off the asphalt\u2019 (The Killing Hour),\u201d\u00a0<\/em>she writes.<\/p>\n

For a blood-spattered, high body count, you can\u2019t beat Cleave\u2019s 2010 grisly thriller\u00a0Blood Men<\/em>, says Lawn. So it\u2019s no surprise he has apparently had people come up to him at overseas literary festivals saying they won\u2019t be visiting New Zealand after reading his books, she says. Crime fiction, by the likes of Ben Sanders and Chad Taylor, is typically set in urban environments; \u201coften in the seedy part of town, also linking the wrong side of tracks to the right side of tracks,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cYou have the salubrious leafy suburbs or corporate downtown mirrored sky scraper feeding off, or trafficking into, the down and out suburbs. You have the social ecology of crime in these novels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Character in New Zealand crime fiction is efficiently sketched, says Lawn, sometimes through wise-cracking one-liners, like the portrayal of Bryce Spurdle in Paul Thomas\u2019\u00a0Inside Dope; \u201c<\/em>watching [him] eat was like watching a paisley shirt in a tumble dryer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kiwi crime authors freely extend conventional genres, creating hybrids by grafting detective elements onto romance, historical and domestic fiction. Unlike the 1930s and 40s American hard-boiled, loner detective, the New Zealand detective is \u201ctypically self-deprecating or self-doubting\u201d and more likely to work in a team.<\/p>\n

Largely missing is the figure of the\u00a0femme fatale<\/em>\u00a0of early American crime novels. Instead, the amateur female sleuth is out in force in many a Kiwi crime book, her presence rendering the\u00a0femme fatale<\/em>\u00a0irrelevant, Dr Lawn says.<\/p>\n

When it comes to murder weapons, Kiwi authors are distinctively quirky. \u201cGuns are generally shunned in favour of more improvised methods of disabling the criminal, such as a frying pan, spade, bronze horse sculpture, can of aerosol fly spray, or strategically-inserted wireless telephone aerial,\u201d she notes.<\/p>\n

Does she think this murderous literary trend offers any insights into our national psyche?<\/p>\n

It might reflect a growing distrust of police by some, she suggests. \u201cMany crime novels now have a corrupt current or former police officer as one of its investigators. It\u2019s become part of the genre to have a compromised investigator teaming up with a straight or protocol-obeying member\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of points of genre fiction is that you are writing for a market, so you\u2019re thinking about what out there is of interest to people. It\u2019s writing for the market rather than \u2018how do I want to express myself?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen writing for a market you are probably tapping into existing social desires, picking up on a vibe. It\u2019s often said that genre fiction is a better index of popular interests and desires than the more elite, high-brow novels\u201d.<\/p>\n

Dr Lawn\u2019s article also gives an update on the genres of sci-fi and political dystopia, and notes the emergence of newer literary species such as paranormal romance, steampunk, and eco-dystopia.<\/p>\n

These are all hopeful signs at a time of retrenchment and general gloom in the publishing industry, she says, with e-book, self-publishing and fan sites supporting new niche genres and the \u201cplurality of voices, identities, genres, and audiences\u201d they cater to both locally and globally.<\/p>\n

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Bloody, funny – the golden age of NZ crime fiction Blood-soaked with a vein of humour. These are the distinctive features of home grown crime fiction, which has soared in popularity over the past two decades, says an academic who\u2019s read most of it. In fact the past 20 years have been dubbed \u2018the golden […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,9,12,10],"tags":[57,55,56],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-albany","category-campus","category-creative-writing","category-subject","tag-crime-fiction","tag-lawn","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/52"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":453,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions\/453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}