During November each year, thousands of people around the globe take part in Nation Novel Writing Month (that’s NaNoWriMo for short), in which each person attempts to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Last year nearly 200,000 people took part and even more will try this year.

One of the greatest myths of our age is the possibility of creativity. This may sound like a pessimistic place to start an article on creative writing, but it is hardly possible to talk about art without considering the challenges that have faced all artistic production over the last 100 years. Of course, there is still the production of interesting and relevant cultural objects, that stand in the place that art has always stood, that engage in the same sorts of debates as older art. That is there are new cultural products that take on the same cultural function of older art, but in a new and changed world. The question, then, is why so many people are trying to create novels so quickly. What is the attraction of NaNoWriMo, and is it a good thing?

In all honesty, any novel of this length written in such a short time is liable to be extremely weak. Bulked out by paragraphs, if not pages, of pure irrelevance. Often written from beginning to end in an artificially structured stream of consciousness, the likelihood is that any novel produced is not only unlikely to be read, but is likely to be unreadable. Apart from this, the challenge of writing points to a greater problem: the obsession with finished products. Without a doubt, most people writing will be doing it for a personal sense of achievement and the ability to say, “this is something that I made, it is mine, and it is part of me.” People become no longer defined by process, by subjectivity, but rather by what they produce, and ultimately objects,

What we are actually looking at is an issue of alienation. A society in which people are so lacking in their sense of self, that they feel they must produce something tangible to others to continue existing, whether that be a child or a novel or a symphony. And the point is simply that this is, and will forever be, a poor reason to write a novel, to have a child, or to write a symphony. Rather than engaging with an alienated society, these people attempt to rectify it through the imposition of their so-called creativity, and yet are forever doomed to failure.

Novels are fantastic things, and their production is something we should continue to value, but the point of a work of art, and the conditions of a work’s production is not something that we can take lightly. Creative possibility is not some omnipresent aura that may be tapped by anybody at any time, and as soon as we begin to be honest about that we may be able to engage with some of the major problems of society. Instead, NoNoWriMo is just popularising a notion of creativity that has never, and can never, exist. Maybe we should believe in humanity for what it is, rather than believing in it based on its ability to produce large piles of rubbish.

Marking 30 years of the London Review of Books, The Third Estate talks to Senior Editor Paul Myerscough and attempts to condense three decades into three thousand words

On Friday the London Review of Books will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a bumper length edition and the launch of the magazine’s online archive comprising no less than 30 million words in 12,000 essays by more than 2,000 contributors.

I started reading the LRB the year after I left university, while working in Hong Kong as a secondary school teacher. With no marking to do, few lessons to teach and no extra-curricula activities to oversee, my timetable might have been gratifyingly blank but for the school’s draconian (at least as it seemed to me at the time) working culture. Teachers, when not in the classroom, were forbidden from leaving their desks in the staffroom, much less the school, during working hours. It was bad form to turn off your computer or to use it to play videos or computer games (though such programmes were far beyond the capabilities of my laptop which wheezed whenever asked to load so much as a picture or the bright, gurning dragon school logo on the screensaver). ‘You have to appear to work at all times’ an experienced TEFL teacher had counselled me, ‘which is why I choose a desk at the back of the room. They can’t see the screen that way.’

But I couldn’t get my desk moved and with the Head of English seated behind me I had to be careful what I looked at. Too long surfing the BBC Sport’s website inevitably led to the questions like, ‘Hey what you doing?’ or ‘Hey, Lazy, you want do some marking?’

Mercifully at some point I stumbled upon the LRB’s website. It remains one of the best presented and easy to use sites on the net and, wondrously, it had no slow to load, easy to condemn, pictures. Reading the LRB I looked like I was working. Sometimes I even felt like I was, but not too often. Plus I learned stuff, stopped reading my father’s Spectator, made ill advised friendships with people like Salman and took my first steps towards apparently continuous, unemployability…

To mark 30 years of LRB, I spoke to Senior Editor, Paul Myerscough, about where the magazine stands politically, how significant political essays can be, whether he’d noticed any changes to government policy following articles written in the magazine, the sensitive issue of ‘snark’ and whatever happened to Christopher Hitchens.

The Third Estate: So how are you marking the 30th Anniversary?

Paul Myerscough: It’s an occasion when you roll out the people who are seen as your key contributors. We have pieces by Hilary Mantel, Andrew O’Hagan, John Lanchester, a huge piece by Jacqueline Rose on honour killing, Jeremy Harding and so on. It’s an occasion to show the kind of writing resources we have available.

Early next year there will be a series of lectures at the British Museum by Neil McGregor, Frank Kermode and Rory Stewart. We are about to launch the archive, the whole 30 years online. Next year we’ll have the anniversary of our independence from the New York Review Books. We started out as an insert and became independent after six months.

The Third Estate: The archive must have been very time consuming and expensive to organise so why have you chosen to put it up now?

Paul Myerscough: In a way all magazines of any status seem to be doing this, and quite right too. Technology and culture have brought us to a point where I’m not sure that any magazine or periodical can be excused for not doing it. I think you need to be able to trace the history of a publication―not least as a matter of pleasure: it’s such a lovely thing to go back through the history of a magazine to see how it’s contributors have changed, how its thinking might have changed―if a magazine can be said to have a consistent line of thought―and to build a cross reference, in so many ways: across personalities, across historical periods, across places to tease out a paper’s identity. If you can do this with the Economist, or the TLS or the Guardian, or the London Review of Books, then an archive seems to be indispensible. Magazines no longer live in the present moment. They live in the past too. We want them to do that, especially during an age in which information is processed incredibly quickly. Magazines now seem to be engaged in curation.

The Third Estate: That idea reminds slightly of Jonathan Franzen’s essay on the social novel, where he suggested the novel was incapable of keeping up with the contemporary world. There’s seems to be more reportage in the LRB nowadays and I wondered whether it sees itself as filling a gap which novels about contemporary events might have covered but aren’t able to any longer―or whether it may be facing the same problem as the social novel, that it can’t keep up with the 24 hour news cycle?

Paul Myerscough: It’s certainly true we have more reportage than we used to. We have more long essays on political and cultural subjects. We do think of ourselves as responding to an absence elsewhere―but the absence is not of coverage so much as simply of depth. It’s the length of the LRB articles that make things possible. Some of the broadsheets do a very good job of commentary alongside news, but they always have to compress it into spaces of no more than a thousand words. And that necessarily forces them into certain modes of speaking, certain ways of presenting an argument. What the LRB and some other magazines do is give their writers space to breathe. This makes certain kinds of argument possible. To take one example it makes historical argument possible, so when Ross McKibbin writes for us on politics he’ll very often set Labour thinking in the context of Labour thinking over the past ten, twenty, thirty years― sometimes fifty or a hundred years. It’s very difficult to do that except in a gestural way at a shorter length. What I think we’re doing is making available an old journalistic mode; the long 19th century essay. So your reference to the social novel may not be a coincidence. There’s something about the length that makes it possible to examine the social in a way that we tend to identify with the 19th century essay or novel, and that doesn’t fit very well into the other sources from which we get our news.

The Third Estate: It seems to be having more of an impact―I noticed Rory Stewart’s article got picked up recently and I wonder how much you consciously try to influence the news agenda.

Paul Myerscough: OK, where did you see it picked up?

The Third Estate: BBC Newsnight, and I’m fairly sure the Daily Mail ran a long extract.

Paul Myerscough: Possibly, possibly. I have thought about this… getting picked up: where you can expect to get picked up? I don’t think any of us imagine, do we, that Barack Obama after an eighteen hour day at work goes to the West Wing and reads the New York Review of Books? We don’t imagine either that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown do, even though both have written for the LRB in the past. Are their advisors reading magazines? I’m not sure how far down the chain you have to go before you get people, young people probably, in lower levels of government, who are reading everything. But that process of filtration begins at that lower level and gets honed and honed until at a senior level you really can’t expect to be having an impact in that sense. So you have to rely, as you say, on other media sources. It’s in those places you hope to make an impact. Even then it’s initially disappointing. When you’ve being doing this for a while, you just have to be sanguine about it. It just doesn’t happen very often. It happens with Rory. Rory is a prospective Tory MP, already a very significant figure in his own right, one of the few authoritative voices on Afganistan we have in this country and so it’s not surprising when he makes a statement in the LRB that it will get picked up by other sources. It would get picked up wherever it was. But what happens when Gareth Peirce writes about the al-Megrahi case for us? She publishes her essay and you think my God, this surely has to be answered at some level―and nothing happens . The Independent reprinted it in entirety, but it just doesn’t make the same sort of impact. You want to cry that it doesn’t, because in a sense the case she’s presenting is so extraordinary that it can’t be addressed in a culture in which there’s consensus: every time al-Megrahi is referred to he is the Lockerbie Bomber―and that’s in news sources. So what happens when you have piece that says he didn’t do it, actually it was someone else? You can’t really expect that to be picked up at―except that it’s Gareth Piece, the most respected defence solicitor on miscarriages of justice this country has. So I think you have grounds to influence whoever by publishing it. All you can really do is put these things into the public sphere and hope that they get picked up. Very often it doesn’t happen.

The Third Estate: It seems to fall on one side of the mass civilization, minority culture side of the debate. Does it consciously pitch itself there or is that an inevitable consequence of the way it’s written?

Paul Myerscough: No, it’s not done consciously. You have a magazine which if you set out to publish long reviews and essays on a full variety of subjects you do so hoping to bring―not a seriousness, though often that―but a depth, an angle, an originality and a style―and you’re doing that with 70,000 words per issue―then you really can’t expect very many people to engage with that. It’s a real demand, a demand which we don’t expect a lot of people, younger people in particular, to meet any more. Which, again, is why the archive has been made available online, why, also the blog. You have to find new ways of presenting the mode of thinking in technologically more accessible forms. The paper will always be there for people who want to read. We’ve always made quite a lot content available for free and that’s helped our traffic and helped us put our major intervention pieces up there in a way that helps them circulate

The Third Estate: Perry Anderson wrote in the introduction to one of the LRB’s anthologies that ‘the style of the writer comes before the importance of a subject or the affinity of a position’ is that true?

Paul Myerscough: Did he say that so concisely? That’s interesting. I’m glad we got Perry to do that knowing that Perry will not bend himself… It’s an accusation that’s been made of us. But it’s not true of course. Yes, we try to publish writers who are as stylish as possible in the field they write about. But the point of the style is not as some sort of decorative accessory and if the style is obfuscatory, that is a disaster. The point of being a stylish writer, of being a good writer is to bring alive the subject you’re writing about, the idea you’re trying to convey, in such a way that the reader is carried along with them. When you’ve got an essay of three or four thousand words, you’re hoping the reader will find their way to the end of a piece. Most people are going to give up on a piece that long unless it is well written. Style is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Style has to be in service of content. Maybe we used to publish articles like that, not anymore.

The Third Estate: Has that changed since 2001, since 9/11?

Paul Myerscough: In a way you’re speaking to the wrong person. I joined the paper the week after and was interviewed here the day after 9/11. You can imagine what the interview was like, essentially an editorial meeting on how the event was going to be covered… I don’t think it was a watershed for the paper in terms of its political thinking, because you’re able to go back to the beginning of the paper, certainly back to the Falklands and the Miners strike, and see very engaged political coverage of the news events of the day. Of course it had already been involved with Israel, Palestine so in terms of its thinking, coverage and way of doing things―no 9/11 was not a watershed. But it was in the kind of attention given to the paper, turning people’s eyes towards it, both in terms of people newly admiring and also newly suspicious.

The Third Estate: I think at this point I’m going to ask about Christopher Hitchens. He hasn’t written for the LRB since 9/11 and his last two books weren’t reviewed particularly favourably.

Paul Myerscough: At the level of reviews that’s not by design, we almost go in the other direction. I’ll come back to Hitchens I don’t want to avoid that. The Believer, a magazine in the States, launched a good few years ago with a manifesto against ‘snark’, which said they would avoid ‘snark’ and as one of their examples of ‘snark’, they chose a particular review published in this magazine by James Wood, of a Zadie Smith novel. Now we just don’t commission people to write that kind of review. That kind of review very rarely appears. Of course occasionally someone will write a piece that is deeply negative because, when they get the book, they feel that way about it. But we really don’t set people up. So if Hitchens has had negative reviews from our contributors it’s absolutely not because we’ve decided to give Hitchens a kicking. And we absolutely don’t want to because there’s actually quite a lot of love for Hitchens here. He wrote many wonderful pieces for this magazine. On certain subjects we wish we could still have him but over the question of 9/11 and American foreign policy, in relations to Iraq and attitudes towards Islam, I think at that time, it became more difficult for us to carry his articles. They wouldn’t have sat very well in the London Review’s pages.

The Third Estate: With the editors or the readers?

Paul Myerscough: Well, I suppose people will always want to ask about the relationship between the magazine and its editors. Contrary to what many people think this is not the kind of office where it’s understood what kind of line the magazine will take before we do anything, there is no consensus on many things. None the less, in the way that any magazine has a more or less defined political identity, the LRB is not the Spectator. Clearly it is left-of-centre. Clearly it is more interested in talking about certain issues in one way rather than another. We actually crave finding people who disagree with us, who present their arguments cogently and coolly, in the same kind of prose we hope our writers consider political issues. We often don’t find that our opponents do that. It’s quite hard to find rightwing thinkers who write in a way we feel we can publish, when we do we will publish them; Edward Luttwack for example and Ian Gilmour. A lot of our writers simply wouldn’t identify themselves as coming from the left. I’m not even sure some of our writers on British Politics would identify themselves as being from the left. But, Hitchens, it wasn’t so much his position (although I doubt it was one anyone here would have agreed with) but it was also the case his writing seemed to us rhetorically enflamed in a way that offered―more heat than light.

The Third Estate: Are there any personal favourites coming out in the archive?

Paul Myerscough: Quite a lot of pleasure will just be clicking on a name and seeing what they did. One of the pleasures for me will be going back to particular events. So, go to 1984 and see what the LRB had to say about the Miners Strike, go to 1982 and look at the Falklands War, go to important moments in the recent history of Israel and Palestine and see what Edward Said had to say about them. Or to take an example that leaps to mind, look at an article that by someone few people have heard of, Norman Dombey, about the state of the Iraqi arsenal before the Iraq war and find out just how many things he said came to be true in the light of events. But there’s so much it would be quite an obsessive job to get a grip on the whole 30 years.

The Third Estate: I have a not entirely formulated question on how the LRB sees itself as promoting more sophisticated literary fiction. Do you worry that its message is getting trampled out by things like the Tesco Top 40 or Richard and Judy’s book club?

Paul Myerscough: No, I think we’d always sit on one side of that. Part of the point of opening a bookshop was to give a spatial possibility for people to curate their reading in a different way. What the supermarkets and Richard and Judy do in terms of selecting and producing a kind of hierarchy of books has little to do with what we do. These days we don’t publish negative long reviews. We publish at most two novel reviews an issue, fifty in a year. We get sent fifty novels in a week sometimes. So there isn’t much point reviewing novels which you don’t think deserve the reader’s attention. You try to pick the ones that have a chance of being good and send those out to get reviews. It’s hard, you’d actually like to be reviewing literature in translation more, you’d hopefully be making your novel coverage more abstruse, not less. Making it less tailored to the British publishing market. It is still interesting to have reviews of the latest novels of major figures writing. Even so we aren’t going to review every novel by AS Byatt or Martin Amis. You go back to these writers every so often, to see whether there’s a good revisionary account to be made. In the end you hope to be able to say you have given some attention to most of the writers who people might want to read. But it’s hard finding as much space as you would like, never mind finding the writers you want to write about them.

The Third Estate: Was it a good year for the Booker Prize? Does the prize have too much influence?

Paul Myerscough: It was a good year for us in the sense that Hilary Mantel won. Hilary has been writing for us for a long time. Just because of that prejudice it was easy to think they’d made the right choice. There are all sorts of prizes which are given disproportionate amounts of attention in different fields. The Turner Prize would be one for example. But again it’s a similar situation to supermarkets. The Booker Prize is a matter of the logic of publicity and sales. Its impact is massive in that area. Look at the statistics about the sort of difference it makes to be on the shortlist on the one hand and to win on the other. It makes thousands of percent difference. We used to carry ‘Shortcuts’ in my early time here. James Francken would read all the Booker Prize shortlist novels and write a short article going through them. We haven’t done that in recent years. We’ll pay attention to the individual works but we don’t prioritize. You have to exist on one side of the prize culture and the mainstream. You either have to give an original take on the things everyone else is paying attention to or you have to pay attention to texts no one else is paying attention to. We try to do both.

JW Arble’s pick of the LRB archive

Guest post by Tadzio Koelb

Chester Himes

This week Chester Himes would have celebrated his 100th birthday. If this event is remembered at all, it will mostly be by those who are interested in Himes as the “black Raymond Chandler”, pulp master of the Harlem Renaissance. While this is an accurate reflection of how Himes is read, it overlooks an important side to Himes’ work, one that is both deeper and more personal, as well as more universal and instructive.

The crime novel is, after all, a versatile crutch. So established that in its most rudimentary shape it is practically pre-written, it nevertheless provides an occasional refuge for the most meditative of authors, writers who have roamed far enough from the conventional that only a vehicle as unswerving as the detective story can hold them steady. Chester Himes may have been hard-boiled, but there is another tradition to which he belongs, one more esoteric and – dirtiest of dirty words – cerebral; one more European than American; one in which his closest literary sibling is neither African-American nor a pulp writer nor a tough, but an educated white foreigner and intellectual: the high-modernist Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

The similarities they share are as serious as numerous. Before inventing their detectives, both Himes and Dürrenmatt were writers of difficult work either constricted in the public mind by narrow genres (Himes had written about his periods of incarceration, and his earliest work was characterised as “prison writing”; Dürrenmatt was known as a proponent the theatre of the absurd) or else essentially disowned by meaningless name-calling (“black writing”; “experimental drama”). Both turned to crime, as it were, for a change of pace. It was a lucrative sideline – that for Himes, at least, became an occupation – but one both put to use within the broader progress of their fiction.

Each writer worked in a mode closer to the thriller than the mystery end of the spectrum. Himes constructed on the genre a platform from which to launch a coded diatribe against a racist America; Dürrenmatt used it to structure his explosive extemporising, and found it a natural forum in which to express his distrust of human-built systems. (It is a pity that Malcolm Lowry, also 100 years old this year, never discovered the whodunit: it would have given welcome form to the woolly, delicate, almost continentally slow drifting of his creativity; his painfully introspective take on the drunk cop could have been a fascinating – and much welcomed – re-orientation of the genre.)

Chester Himes’s best-known characters are of course the “ace” detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Always a step behind, able to gather information only by violent means, they bungle and bully their way through case after case in what must be some of the subtlest satires of police brutality and incompetence ever written. By virtue of their skin, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are considered apart from a predominantly white police force, a symbol in Himes’ Harlem of the repression under which most blacks are constrained to live; and yet it is precisely the detectives’ blackness that makes their adoption of police rhetoric and tactics – almost exclusively of the worst kind – such a powerful representation of corruption, and of how it is institutionalised to protect the powerful at the expense of the poor.

All Shot Up provides a very good example. During the course of the book, the detectives kowtow to a corrupt Harlem politician; are involved in a chase that leads to the violent decapitation of a petty criminal; and regularly beat witnesses – all of carefully differentiated shades of black – including (if not especially) those who try to help them. As we watch the pair fumble violently but unsuccessfully through a series of conversations and confrontations, we must note that where Jones and Johnson are on the case important clues are commonly overlooked, witnesses are killed or left unquestioned, and the officers’ abuse of power is both constant and unapologetic; it becomes difficult to imagine that these are anyone’s idea of “aces”. All that can be said to redeem them are a belated resolution of the investigation, the donation of stolen money to the Fresh Air Fund, and a dedication to their work that nevertheless rests upon questionable motives. Do they do it because they believe in the law? If so, why do they feel so free to break what, in the parlance of the genre, they are “sworn to uphold”? Do they do it because they enjoy the position of power and privilege it gives them? Or is it simply that they needed to do something, and the work matched their temperaments? The issue of whether they brought violence to their jobs or their jobs brought it to them remains uninvestigated: in Himes the question of origin is always overwhelmed by the crushing demands of the status quo. There is no need to mention slavery – on every page, it is implied – and no time to worry about the past when the present is so alarming.

Race naturally plays an important part in Grave Digger and Coffin’s investigations. As black detectives in a time of segregation they police only black neighborhoods; they are often the target of racist jokes or insults by white officers. Although they react to these affronts with the outrage one expects, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed themselves embrace a politics of colour, sex, sexuality, and status incompatible precisely with the meritocracy that would be to their greatest benefit were they in fact any good at their jobs. When challenged by their superior officer, the white Lieutenant Anderson, they tend to disarm him with vague accusations of racism. They are homophobic, as well, and yet their own position as black men serving a status quo that favours whites is mirrored throughout the book by incidents of cross-dressing. It is Grave Digger himself who remarks that the gay and black communities are similarly marginalised; he then goes on to threaten a helpful gay witness with an unnamed fate should the investigation go awry.

The cross-dressing also mirrors and highlights certain physical alterations that Coffin Ed and Grave Digger undergo. As the story progresses we are regularly reminded of the acid burns that scar Coffin Ed’s face, the result of an attack by a suspect during the course of a previous investigation. The burns were grafted with lighter skin taken from another part of his body, marring the physical aspect – colour – by which Coffin Ed is both socially and professionally defined, “whitening” him a little. Because the scars are the result of his job, it is easy to see them as a physical representation of the moral disorder that marks his career.

Following the bungled pursuit that leads to the decapitation of a potentially important witness, Grave Digger crashes the car. During the accident he loses parts of two front teeth, and causes considerable damage to his lips; from then on, he is described almost always as lisping when he speaks, a characteristic attributed by stereotype – and in Himes’ world we are always acutely, even painfully, aware of stereotype – to gay men. To an extent, the detectives are negatively defined to the reader: they are neither white (not even light-skinned), nor gay, but each now bears some external resemblance to one of those groups. In each case the resemblance arises from a job-related injury, tying their physical degeneration to the course of their inquiry. The work of physically occupying a place, the job of “improving” a society by controlling it, changes people, we gather, almost as much as the chore of being occupied.

At an important point in the book, the detectives receive a call from a stool pigeon, a fortune-teller and gay cross-dresser known as Lady Gypsy. She tells them a car they are looking for is parked in his street; the driver and passengers are customers waiting in Gypsy’s other room. It is the only lead the detectives have so far. When they arrive, the car and its occupants are gone; Lady Gypsy and her companion have been attacked. Despite having provided an opportunity to advance their case, Gypsy is struck several times by Grave Digger during a predictably violent interrogation. It is telling that when Lady Gypsy announces plans to have her earlier assailants charged, she says nothing about pressing charges against the police.

This acceptance of the police force as an instrument of brutality is an indictment not just of Johnson and Jones but of the society which produced them. Indeed, at times it is almost as if it were because violence is expected of them that the detectives are so quick to indulge. Like the criminals they hunt, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are part and parcel of the repressive machine, but in a sense, the book infers, so are those who accept them – and everyone accepts them. In Himes, black American culture exists exclusively under siege, and the soldiers who pitch the battle – whether police or criminals – are indistinguishably frightening to the civilian population.

If Himes’ heroes don’t fit the genre stereotype, neither do Himes’ stories meet expectations: the detectives do practically no detecting, for example, and there is little by way of suspense. The reader comes to realise early on that if he had hoped for a dazzling denouement, he had better not hold his breath. Crime and its resolution are not the point of a Chester Himes crime novel.

Himes, as an ex-convict, certainly had reason to distrust police. What perhaps emerges from his writing, however, is that he also had reason to distrust himself. Like other notables of the Harlem Renaissance, whether Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, Chester Himes had access through his writing to a (predominantly white) world that few blacks could reach, and then only through the counterfeit of “passing”. Like many of his contemporaries, Himes blurred the distinction by moving to France. “White” culture as it existed in America was found not to be universal; this was the comforting obverse of the effect experienced by American blacks who visited Africa to discover a world they didn’t recognise or necessarily care for, but that comfort could feel like betrayal. It is perhaps not surprising that the name of the well-to-do political boss who feeds off the poor blacks of Harlem to support a lifestyle only whites can usually afford is Caspar Holmes – not all that far from the author’s own.

Himes never stands up for criminals, however, nor does he sentimentalise the victims of crime: in his rogues’ gallery there is no Arsène Lupin, no gentlemanly, happy-go-lucky imp to represent the populist sense of a corrupt but necessary system set aright by individual acts of mischief. Generally, criminals are hoods, parasites preying on gullible (but not necessarily honest) citizens, or else hardened killers who never consider their actions. Sometimes they are people simply so degraded by poverty that they are incapable of other behavior. Those who are victims today might be perpetrators tomorrow: no one is innocent.

During a quiet moment in All Shot Up, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger discuss a Gorky short story about a boy who disappears beneath the ice of a frozen pond; the body is never found, and townsfolk come to the conclusion that he may never have existed. The story is of course a parable for the turning of a blind eye, whether by a family towards such unpleasant subjects as an unhappy marriage or child abuse; or by a society and government towards police brutality and the systematic repression of a racial minority. In a certain sense, this is the crime that all Himes’ books investigate, and the culprit never varies. It is all of us.

It might be just this subtlety amid the carnage that makes Himes’ writing, seemingly so cinematographic, such a difficult thing to film. Each medium makes its own demands of the genre, and nuance is the thing least likely to translate. A viewer is very different from a reader, and anyway, Himes’ trick cannot work without a dissenting voice – a dissenting voice of authorial sarcasm which cannot be reproduced on film. A director must chose between offering Himes as he appears, or as he is: Will Grave Digger and Coffin Ed be heroes, “aces”, or will they be blundering, blood-soaked fools? Between the Scylla of Con Air and the Charybdis of Alphaville, Himes steers a dangerous course. Of course Alphaville was famously dull, even for intellectuals, but to strip Himes’ crime fiction of its delicately poised ethical uncertainty is to leave little more than thuggery. It is hardly surprising that the film version of Cotton Comes to Harlem was a bloodbath.

The movie based on For Love of Imabelle, retitled A Rage in Harlem, rather ingeniously sidestepped the issue by making a minor character, Jackson, both the lead role (potentially allowing Gravedigger and Coffin Ed to shade into the morally ambiguous figures they should be, but blunting them by denying their centrality) and a star vehicle for Forest Whitaker, malleable to the actor’s best qualities.

Dürrenmatt’s crime fiction has also been adapted for the cinema. It may be hard to say why Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge (which he called in the subtitle a “requiem for the detective novel”) survived the process so much better. For one thing, certainly, it found the right director in Sean Penn. A story about the misfortunes of chance, one which has no real conclusion, served to cure all the ills of Penn’s previous film, The Crossing Guard. That movie ended with a finale so pat it undid much of the hard work that came before. Dürrenmatt’s novel gave Penn the opportunity he never gave himself, the opportunity to profit by uncertainty, and Penn embraced it. It may also be because The Pledge doesn’t really resemble Dürrenmatt’s other crime fiction. The novel was itself based on a failed screenplay, “Es geschah am hellichten Tag”, and unlike The Judge and His Hangman or The Quarry, judiciously avoids the unrepresentable, when the unrepresentable is precisely at the heart of those other works.

Of course Dürrenmatt can’t help but play sly games (naturally removed from the film version): The Pledge is a story narrated, for example, by a (drugged and drowsy) character who strongly resembles the author, as heard from another person who knows much of it only second-hand. However unconventional that sounds, The Quarry takes such destabilising elements much further. While it includes a “locked door” murder, that staple of the form, the rest of the book has in common with detective fiction only that it features a detective and a criminal. In fact, there are many crimes in The Quarry: a missing person, a stolen identity, a murder, all quite implausible. There is an implausible cast of characters, too, including a trained acrobatic dwarf, an enormous, avenging, Golem-like Jew called Gulliver, and a death-obsessed nurse.

The story is no easier to believe. The plot lurches forward from the unlikely discovery of a crime by the retired detective Barlach, a dying man in a hospital bed, while reading an ancient waiting-room magazine, to a confrontation at the heart of the killer’s very public hideout. There is no chase, and very little detecting is done: the guilty, once named, admit their roles and go about their business. The ending requires (of course) a deus ex machina, and is almost entirely unconvincing.

The Quarry is nonetheless a fascinating book: frightening, unsettling, and recognisably of its genre. Behind all these far-fetched aspects of the plot, infusing them with menace, linking them to each other and to reality, lurks the Holocaust, just as the character embodying that event links, by his terrible actions, all the others. This is Emmenberger, a Nazi torturer without conscience, without feeling, without any recognisable human characteristic except his body. Nothing is more unbelievable than Emmenberger’s kind of cruelty, and yet we must believe it: it is historical fact.

Like Gastmann in The Judge and His Hangman, Emmenberger is not a criminal – criminals after all are human. He is, instead, immorality itself, doing ill not from financial necessity or mental illness, but simply because it can be done. Dürrenmatt, the experienced dramatist, avoided such a depiction of pure evil in “Es geschah am hellichten Tag” almost certainly from the knowledge that any attempt to show absolute good or evil in drama always ends up in practice as camp (one need only think of any Bond villain). What remains hidden, meanwhile, has incredible power, and the killer in The Pledge is rarely shown.

Of course, you cannot “solve” the Holocaust, and Barlach, confined throughout The Quarry to his sick bed, is forbidden to try. Instead, the story comes to him, as it comes to us all who didn’t experience it – and just as the story of All Shot Up comes to Johnson and Jones. If All Shot Up and The Quarry don’t turn out to be completely ridiculous it is simply for this reason: that we know the very worst of these things, the most unimaginable, inconceivable in their cruelty and horror, to have occurred: slavery, the Holocaust, all the terrible half-forgotten violence of human history. What then remains to stop us accepting the rest, the dwarf, the giant, the cross-dressers, the stunts and deceptions? This is what makes the god from the machine indispensable; nothing else will do to purge the scene. In Barlach’s case the god is Gulliver, a character who somehow stands in for the reader. Like the reader, he is unconvinced by one of Barlach’s many failed ruses; like the reader, he is concerned, and has been following the story closely throughout. When he arrives (at the last possible moment, of course – this is a genre novel, after all) to take his revenge on Emmenberger, we cannot help but feel relieved, even grateful, no matter how skeptical we remain.

Skepticism is at the very center of all Dürrenmatt’s crime fiction, just as it is at the center of Himes’. It is especially to be found in moments of resolution: such justice as can be found is always extra-judicial, by and large unbelievable, and generally requires the commission of a crime. Importantly, it has no suspensory effect: the damage is already done. What follows is either a primitive act of atavistic human nature, desperate for revenge, or the academic application of some hypothesis of retribution as balm. This distrust of any practicable justice is what Dürrenmatt shares with Himes, and what they two share with almost no other crime writers of merit. Both Dürrenmatt and Himes doubt the social system created to impose the law, and in this they are not alone: it is the essentially reactionary temptation of the crime thriller to seel solace in natural (i.e, bloody and extra-social) justice rather than judicial process. What makes these two writers so special is that when each finally takes justice out of the hands of society and invests it in individuals, it is only to reject the solution as outrageously flawed. That paradox is the real mystery of their work.

Tadzio Koelb is a writer and critic. He lives in Tunisia.

Alexi Kaye Campbell’s award winning first play Pride was far and away my favourite play of 2008. It was intelligent, funny, very well produced and moving. Apologia, his new play at the Bush Theatre, isn’t quite as impressive but is still very good.

Apologia, as one character helpfully explains, is a widely misused word which actually means ‘a formal, written defence of one’s opinions or conduct… not to be confused with an apology’. The Apologia in question is that of an eminent art historian and feminist Kristin Miller (Paoloa Dionsittia), whose recently published memoirs bear the same title. Tonight is her birthday party and her sons, who have not been mentioned in her memoirs, are due to attend. Understandably they’re not happy about being overlooked, not least as they believe she ‘abandoned’ them as children when she divorced their father and moved to Italy. Doesn’t she care?

All this sets up a rather fabulous structure for the play as lived defence – in real time, over the kitchen table ― of a book which was a theoretical defence of a life Kristin will claim was always guided by a defined principles. The play is also presumably Campbell’s own Apologia (though to make it in only his second play seems, and I think proves to be, a touch premature.

Apologia isn’t as interesting as Pride in which the ideas really emerged from characters reactions to life. Here the ideas are imposed supra mundi, although the humanist doctrine ultimately endorsed is at times a bit fuzzy.

Though Kristin is happy to condemn Margaret Thatcher as ‘a man with a vagina’ she too is not a lady keen on turning. There seems to be a contradiction between her rejection of patriarchy in favour of individual self-determination, and her naked disapproval of the selfishness she all too easily detects in others (it makes for good drama but bad philosophy). Nor do I quite buy the view that art criticism can be understood as an intrinsically moral good; an orthodoxy I thought had started to die off.

Kristin’s ‘opponents’, especially soap actress Claire (Nina Sosanya), aren’t especially sophisticated either, though they are given (unnecessarily it seems to me) much opportunity to lay out their straw defences. The less good second half of the play includes numerous set-piece speeches where the characters speak at, rather than to each other, and the narrative tension largely dissipates.

Perhaps it’s this which explains the slightly rushed delivery by most of the cast (Tom Beard’s Peter is an honourable exception). Even Paola Dionisotti, who is for the most part excellent―and stunning at the end of the play―has a tendency to sweep through many of her speeches. Sarah Goldberg’s performance as Trudi (Peter’s American- Christian fiancé) I found at first irritating but soon won me round―as indeed her character was meant to―and she was a favourite with the audience.

I’ve been perhaps a bit tough on a play which is for the most part excellent, and required viewing for anyone interested in the future of British Theatre. It is for example extremely funny.

There is a grey area, a no-man’s land, between what may be described as acceptable teasing and the kind of outright rudeness which ends conversations and starts arguments. A few recent TV comedies seem to work entirely in this zone (Peep Show and The Office are obvious examples). They are comedies not of manners, but of anxiety and though Campbell’s jokes are often more straightforward (just as his themes are more complicated) they often tap into this mood. When one character deconstructs another’s use of the word ‘hilarious’ it is both funny in its own right (where the original use was not) and deeply awkward in the relaxed social arena. For the audience it’s like being tickled into a paying closer attention.

And it’s this kind of attention to detail that raises Campbell’s work above that of his contemporaries. I’m already looking forward to what he will write next.