FAQ
#5: Why I love… classic crime fiction
I am not the most practical of men. Put me in the garden and ask me to dig you a hole of any size, I’ll do so happily. Give me an unlimited supply of timber and ask me to build a rabbit hutch, however, and you’re going to be waiting a very long time indeed. I’d theorise the hell out of it – internal height = average rabbit height + 3 standard deviations + largest recorded vertical rabbit hop from rest – but the application of saw to wood is going to go very wrong.
I remember reading an interview with Lee Child in which he likened writing mystery novels to designing a house; if you decide you want an extra window in a room then that’s going to involve moving the sockets you’ve got on the wall, possibly moving the door and so the light-switch, etc. If when writing the final chapter of your novel and suddenly decide someone else should be the killer but you change nothing in the preceding pages…well, catastrophe. My love of theory married to this appreciation of plot construction is what drew me to crime novels in the first place, and the more I read the more I liked it. I began to recognise that, the further back you went, the more of a factor the plotting became and that for sheer joyous planning you really couldn’t beat the classics. There’s a moment in Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun where a bottle being thrown out a window is surprisingly significant – remove that one simple action and a lot of stuff elsewhere doesn’t make sense. Honestly, I think that’s awesome.
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#2: What’s in a name?
So, not to get all insecure and introspective in my first real post, but I wanted to outline choosing “The Invisible Event” as the title for my crime fiction blog. Broadly speaking there are three reasons, and they get more fanciful as they go.
The first comes from my love of impossible crimes and how in impossible crime fiction, by dint of the name, there is something that must have happened but at first glance simply can’t have – a murderer has vanished from a watched room, say. In order for that to have occurred, clearly they must have been invisible and so the “invisible event” is whatever puzzle is presented in a locked room mystery.
The second is a variation on that, the idea of a clue in a crime novel that is so well hidden you miss it completely at first reading, but when brought to your attention at the end it’s the one thing that was to all intents and purposes invisible and would have unlocked everything for you, the reader.
The third, and the phrase itself, comes from from Hamlet, (Act 4 scene 4) who is talking about Fortinbras when he says:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event
The Invisible Event 