The inaugural Dead in Dun Laoghaire Crime Writing Festival took place in the Pavilion Theatre on Saturday the 22nd of July. Attendees had a list of thoroughly impressive guests to choose from, including Paula Hawkins (bestselling author of The Girl on the Train), Booker Prize winning John Banville, and forensic anthropologist-turned-fiction writer Kathy Reichs.
There were sizeable crowds throughout the whole day, and after each event, audience members flooded the foyer to get their books signed by the authors. The talks were all very engaging, covering a wide range of topics including feminism, bestselling success and, perhaps most interestingly, the clash that often arises between “highbrow” literary fiction and “popular” crime writing.
Paula Hawkins and John Banville expanded on this clash mainly by speaking about their use of pseudonyms while writing. This became a recurring theme for the rest of the festival. Hawkins discussed how she had published four novels in the romantic-comedy vein under the name Amy Silver. She described how she gradually came to feel restricted by this genre, while being more and more inclined towards crime and mystery. Writing crime fiction was a way to express herself – “It was a relief to get to be myself,” she told the audience.
Banville echoed these sentiments, saying that he had to convince his publisher that he wasn’t playing a “literary joke” on them, and actually had a desire to write crime fiction. The opportunity to write in this genre as opposed to more highbrow “cerebral” fiction was appealing to him, as he described writing his previous books, most notably The Sea, as a “slog”. Paul Perry, one half of the writing duo known as Karen Perry, also managed to successfully transition into crime fiction despite classifying himself as a poet for many years. Despite these writers’ original (and somewhat loftier), literary ambitions, it was heartening to see them embrace the genre of crime writing, which has often been dismissed by literary elitists. For example, critic Harold Bloom once lamented, “I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.”
While Bloom may not be alone in his thoughts regarding modern popular fiction, the festival certainly made a solid case in its favour, suggesting that reading as we know it may not be dying after all. King was even cited as an influence throughout the day – his impact can be seen clearly in Hawkins’ Into the Water, which bears a striking resemblance to Salem’s Lot with its large, rotating cast of characters and small-town-with-a-dark-secret setting. It’s also interesting to note how writers considered to be of prestige are typically male, as in Bloom’s examples of literature worth celebrating. The number of prominent female crime writers present at the festival hopefully heralds an era in which women can be celebrated for their writing too, without evoking elegiac sadness in old white men.
Although it was ostensibly a crime writing festival, many of the most interesting themes of the day revolved around the wider audiences reached by popular literature in general, and how the sub-genre of crime writing fits into this dynamic. It was fascinating to listen to successful writers speak about their passion for writing crime fiction. Banville praised the genre as “a good way to address the evil in the world.” Kathy Reichs alluded to the current political climate in the United States, and spoke about her attempts to weave social themes into the plots of her crime novels, including terrorism and Islamophobia. Despite crime fiction being easily accessible to readers, its merits remain undiluted. The sheer size of the genre’s audience renders crime fiction the perfect context for writers to engage with the social issues they deem important on a huge scale. It has also proven itself to be a genre that is welcoming to both female readers and creators; there was a relatively even gender divide between the speakers, and the audience was noticeably comprised of a female majority.
If the festival continues next year, I truly hope that it continues to play a pivotal role in breaking down the perceptions of crime writing as an inherently inferior genre to more ‘prestigious’ fiction.
