'Killing the Shadows': Death Imitates Art By CHARLES
TAYLOR
October 21, 2001 - New York Times.com
HarperCollins 2000
Article from NYTimes.com - Said to be the best review a
crime novel has ever had in the New York Times...
There's no denying the queasy, almost sexual excitement that's part
of the lure of serial-killer thrillers, and in her vivid and adept
new novel, the Scottish writer Val McDermid delivers a serial-killer
thriller that mounts in tension while at the same time making readers
aware of their complicity in craving the grisly shocks the genre
provides. It's a double-tracked approach that would derail a lesser
writer and make an inferior book choke on its contradictions. But,
as Stephen King did in ''Bag of Bones,'' McDermid is trying to address
the inhumanity that's all too easy for popular writers to lapse
into as they seek to titillate an increasingly jaded readership.
McDermid is too sophisticated a novelist to preach or condemn. Maybe
this is because in two previous books, ''The
Mermaids Singing'' and ''The
Wire in the Blood'' (fine, intelligent, gripping thrillers both),
she herself was not above occasionally indulging in the genre's
gruesome trappings.
There are several gruesome passages in ''Killing the Shadows.''
And nearly every one tops the one before in terms of sheer perversity.
Here's the catch: the killings and mutilations described are all
excerpts from serial-killer thrillers written by characters in the
book. When those same writers are killed off in almost exact re-creations
of the murder scenes they've devised, McDermid spares us the details.
She doesn't have to describe the authors' murders: the selections
from their books already tell us how they're going to be butchered.
But McDermid's discretion serves to make a subtler point: that real
violence has an awfulness that fictional violence can never match,
and that these writers are only guessing at the impact of their
subject. When the thriller writer Kit Martin hears about the first
murder of one of his colleagues, he remembers a reviewer who ''once
remarked that Kit made his readers care so much for his fictional
victims that the reader felt the shock of losing a real friend when
he killed them off. At the time, he'd been proud of the comment.
But back then, he'd never personally known someone who had been
murdered. Sitting in a strange hotel room in an unfamiliar city
. . . he finally recognized the critical comment for the absurdity
it had been.''
The heroine of ''Killing the Shadows'' is Fiona Cameron, Kit's
lover, an academic psychologist who has aided the police in finding
killers. She is not a behaviorist. Not for her what she calls ''the
touchy-feely 'wet the bed when he was 9 and tortured the neighbor's
cat' stuff.'' Instead of projecting back, in the manner of a behaviorist,
Fiona works solely on the information at hand, trying to deduce
what the habits and rituals of murder can tell her about the probable
identity of the killer. But Fiona's own past has played a determining
role in her life. The unsolved murder of her younger sister, Lesley,
was the event that led Fiona, for whom knowledge is a sort of comfort,
into her line of work. Like Tony Hill, the profiler-hero of ''The
Mermaids Singing'' and ''The Wire in the Blood,'' Fiona faces her
fair share of suspicion from cops who see her methods as so much
voodoo. When ''Killing the Shadows'' opens, she has vowed never
to work with the police again. Her insistence that their chief suspect
in a rape and murder case is not the actual killer is, to the police's
chagrin, confirmed when the case is thrown out of court and the
suspect cleared. As the book shifts into its main narrative and
thriller writers start to be killed off, the tension between Fiona
and the police, particularly her good friend Detective Superintendent
Steve Preston, comes back into play. At first, Fiona tries to quell
Kit's fears that he is in danger. Then, as it becomes impossible
to dispute that someone has targeted the group of crime writers
to which Kit belongs, she has to persuade the police who have shunned
her that a serial killer is on the loose.
McDermid is a whiz at combining narrative threads, shifting to
the viewpoints of her various characters (including excerpts from
the diary of the killer, whose identity is as unknown to us as to
her characters) and ending chapters with cliffhangers that propel
you to keep reading. In terms of hooking her readers and carrying
them along out of sheer desire to find out what happens next, McDermid
is as smooth a practitioner of crime fiction as anyone out there.
The real distinction of ''Killing the Shadows,'' though, is McDermid's
unresolved rumination on what responsibility artists bear for what
they create. In the past year, that subject has produced works as
thorny and unique as Philip Kaufman's film ''Quills'' and Eminem's
song ''Stan.'' McDermid doesn't fall into the proscriptive language
of would-be censors and editorial writers. She doesn't think that
violent art turns people into podlike monsters. But, like Kaufman
and Eminem, she admits that there is no such thing as safe art,
no telling what a book or movie or song will provoke once it's sent
out into the world.
WITHIN the context of a genre that depends on murder for thrills,
McDermid is trying to reintroduce the horror, rather than the excitement,
of violence. She is all too aware of how our culture, driven by
both obsession with celebrity and detached, emotionless irony, has
worked to make celebrities out of serial killers. The critic Jake
Horsley has described that phenomenon as a sign of people ''so utterly,
cynically bored and disgusted with their lives (and with society
as a whole) that they can take a perverse, almost suicidal pleasure
in seeing it all come apart before them.''
McDermid doesn't play into that pathology simply because even as
she acknowledges the world's potential for violence, she makes the
world seem like a pretty good place to be. Too many mystery writers
who delve into the personal problems of their heroes wind up with
books in which glumness and depression are the only respites from
violence. McDermid writes to make friendship and love and work seem
like both sustenance and refuge (it's a pleasure to read a novelist
who doesn't moan about writing but describes its privileges and
pleasures), things worth preserving. There is no one in contemporary
crime fiction who has managed to combine the visceral and the humane
(without making either seem a contradiction of the other) as well
as Val McDermid. ''Killing the Shadows'' is further proof that she's
the best we've got.
Charles Taylor is a contributing writer for Salon.com.
