A little bird whispered in my ear that crime fiction vastly outsells science fiction. (So does Generic Fantasy.)

So I tried writing a "locked-room" murder mystery - actually it turned out a "locked-toilet" murder mystery - and sent it to a mystery magazine in the U.S. (My first story featuring the same detective character can be read here. )

It took me a week to write that 3,900-word story - much more work than writing science fiction of the same length. Two reasons why:

1: Traditional detective stories, like romance, follow a rigid set of rules. I always tend to bend and stretch the "rules" of fiction, and it can make editors nervous.

2: Modern technology seriously challenges the classical detective-story "model" that began with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" and reached their first peak with Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.

Computers are to blame.

For instance, in the recent movie DOUBLE JEOPARDY, Ashley Judd plays a woman who is framed for the murder of her husband. It turns out he faked his own death, and she breaks out of prison to hunt him down.

In one scene she goes into an art gallery, borrows a computer, and does a simple Web search for her husband. He turns up in three seconds. Seeing that scene was a revelation. A whole tradition in detective and crime fiction went to the grave in those three seconds! No longer will the detective hero have to beat up hoods, bribe informers or question ex-partners. Just go to Google and find the person!

Then there are those ubiquitous phone-cams. Soon every man, woman and child in the Western Hemisphere will own a cell-phone with a Web-connected camera. The near future will see the number of kidnappings sharply decrease, since every potential victim can IMMEDIATELY send a snapshot of a suspicious-acting person to the police, friends and family. So there's no point in writing those stories either.

You see a shady-loking van cruise around the neighborhood? Phone-cam the license-plate on the fly and send it to the police! You see police brutalizing a suspect? Phone-cam it - it could be the next Rodney King!

And there is the rise of "forensic super-science", as depicted in TV shows like "CSI." While these advanced methods are not as accessible as phone-cams and the Internet, they give the regular police immense powers in identifying a crime suspect. The latest development is to check windowpanes for EAR prints - in case a suspect was eavesdropping by a window. DNA "fingerprints" can be extracted from dandruff, hair, saliva, anything. The police can follow where you go, what Websites you visit, who you called on the phone; the GPS in your cell-phone can give away your physical position. There is no escape.

This spells the end of Sherlock Holmes. His elite expert knowledge is no match for cheap technology which any layperson could use. A more brutal investigator like Mike Hammer is equally obsolete.

So how should the crime and mystery writer react to these developments? One way is to write police procedurals from state-of-the-art insider knowledge of police work, and obsess with technical details like DNA, "profiling" by computer programs, lie detectors... all that tech stuff.

A few writers take their stories to the past, where even fingerprinting doesn't exist, and can comfortably solve locked-room mysteries during the Middle Ages, in ancient Rome, or the pre-Industrial era. It works, but the historical research takes a lot of effort for the writer.

There is another approach: take the fictitious detective to problems that technology alone can't solve. One might, for example, introduce the supernatural element, which subverts the "certainties", the "logic" and "rock-solid evidence" that form the building-blocks of traditional detective stories. But is the result as satisfying to the reader? Probably not, and it allows for cheating. If anything can happen in a story, should the reader care who "did it?"

The greatest loss to crime fiction with the onset of modern technology is that the investigator as a character becomes irrelevant. It does not matter if the detective has personal quirks, has a dark past, struggles with dysfunctional relationships... the technology is universal, and impersonal. Not even intelligence is of particular importance. The detective-as-genius is no longer needed. Routine tasks take over: vacuum for DNA scraps, check the suspects whereabouts through surveillance cameras, do the lie-detector test, request GPS data on the suspects' locations during the crime, run the computer program which calculates the killer's most likely address (such software exists today!)...

One can impose artificial limitations to give the traditional detective-hero more authority: a deadline, corruption in the police force, a villain who's impossible to arrest, and so on. But that's ducking the crisis. How do you write crime fiction when it's fast becoming technically impossible to "get away with it"?

The more challenging approach is to dive into not only the "how" of crime, but also the "why". Detective fiction often contains a great deal of social criticism, and rightly so - at least this is the case with stories and novels in an urban setting. (Who gives a damn about the social problems of a bunch of stuffy aristocrats in a British country mansion?)

But I don't think the detective genre has to wither away. Crime won't die. It will adapt, because the basic human desires which breed crime won't die: envy, greed, lust and rage. It is up to the writers to adapt too, and try out new ways for crime fiction to evolve with the times. Start out by reading the news. New forms of crime have been invented: Computer viruses, e-mail fraud, illegal cloning, sale of weapons technology from the former East Bloc, organ-snatching.

All this doesn't mean people will stop enjoying the old stories, though. One shouldn't forget the comfort of a "cosy" mystery and a familiar, yet quirky character. It's like watching opera: you know what to expect. I never miss a Columbo episode...
:)

-A.R. Yngve

Running a literary website since 1999, where ONLY my own stuff appears, I realize it might come off as self-centered and vain... even whiny.

So I'll try to be harshly self-critical for a while - and avoid phony modesty. Here goes nothing:

Can I write fiction at all? After ten years' practice writing novels, I feel justified in stating: Yeah! Sure, why not?

Have I improved as a writer over time? Hard to say. My grammar and spelling have improved - not all that much, but decently. My style remains fairly similar to how it read in 1993: attempting to write sparse, fluent prose, keeping things simple to follow.

I can look back, re-read a few bits from novels like DARC AGES or ALIEN BEACH, and honestly say: "That passage is so cool."

On the other hand, all those annoying mannerisms are refusing to go away. I still tend to lean on my favorite crutch word "would", and the rhetorical structuring of sentences into "argument followed by word 'but' and counter-argument."

I confess that I'm often frustrated by my inability to create interesting, deep characters, and how I rely on lazy plot clichés. It is inexcusable that I can never allow a truly evil character to get away with being evil - he or she always bites the bullet sooner or later. Is that realism? Hardly. Trite? Moralistic? Absolutely.

Laziness is my worst writing sin. I get impatient, I cut to the chase. Hurry, hurry to the next Big Scene or Significant Plot Development! My ideal novel consisted only of climaxes.

Many of my books could have improved with rewrites. Too often I fall in love with the first or second draft. At my worst, I ignore background; all revolves around people talking.

I tend to repeat favorite themes: music, characters who are loners, and women with an unrealistic capacity for violence. And of course I Write Too Darn Much Science Fiction. SF and deep characterization don't mix very well - yes, the critics are right about that. It's sad. If I wanted to write characters like Flaubert or Philip Roth, then I'd have to skip the sci-fi stuff.

Have I yet written a truly original novel? Frankly, no. Neither plot-wise nor style-wise. DARC AGES is a pastiche of old themes. ALIEN BEACH is a slick rehash of an overly familiar old story. PARRY'S PROTOCOL is based on a pretty original "what-if" concept, but executed in an almost trite, simplistic manner (Protagonists uncover Terrible Secret, are pursued, narrowly escape.)

Almost all my characters are archetypes in one way or another. We have the Reluctant Hero; the World-Weary Investigator; the Man on a Mystical Quest; the Career Woman Desiring a Lost Father-Figure; the Cynical Villain Who Starts Believing His Own Deceptions and Goes Mad In Grandiose Manner; the Street Smart Urban Woman.

There's also the Gruff Old Ship's Captain With a Heart of Gold; the Stoic Matriarch; the Weasely Politician; the Power-Mad Scheming Politician; the Madman With A Terrifying Vision... and that old stalwart, the Plucky Youngsters On A Wilderness Trek.

I'm ashamed of the gratuitous violence in some of my novels. And I cringe at how often I've padded out the plot with comic-book "action" that just goes on (guilty as charged: THE ARGUS PROJECT). Does the heroine have to kill all those henchmen on her way to sanctuary? Is it a book or a videogame? (Actually, THE ARGUS PROJECT was based on a 1990s videogame design.)

Italics. It's simply ridiculous how I use italics to emphasize an important statement. Some of my novels apparently take place in an alternate universe where everybody talk like William Shatner in Star Trek.

And why, oh why must I splatter every sentence with excessive use of -ings? (See ALIEN BEACH: walking, seeing, carrying, following, running... ).

Are there any redemptive qualities in my overall writing? If I may be so bold as to beat my own drum...

I earnestly attempt to give a basic underlying motivation for all the main characters in a novel. If there is an "arch-villain" in my book, no matter how depraved, he's never superhumanly evil, but a human being like any other. "Absolute" Good or Evil never exist. All my characters are essentially selfish.

I have never used a MacGuffin plot device (also known as "collect-the-plot-coupons" plotting). There is no Gadget that Must Be Retrieved. There may be cool gadgets in a story, but they are always in the perifery. My favorite story gadget has to be the Entropy Conductor in ALIEN LAND. Very handy for melting away the ice outside my doorstep... if only I had such a device!

There may be fights, chases and confrontations in my books, but almost all of my plots are centered and resolved around finding deeper knowledge and gaining an insight about the world and people in it. I am never satisified with an ending where an Opponent is Defeated, or a Crime Solved, or An Object Is Found. That's not a real resolution. The characters must be at least a bit wiser at the end, otherwise the whole novel is a big waste of time.

And I am sincerely, honestly proud of my brevity of style. I hate bloated, over-wordy, turgid prose that repeats and repeats and goes on and on... I believe in the musical rhythm of prose. A good sentence can be sung to music and it sounds catchy.

Try it! Sing a sentence you really liked, and notice how good it sounds... how the words alliterate and flow together. Then try to sing a really awful, flat sentence. It's guaranteed to sound like pretentious, dreary NuMetal "music" or a Britney Spears atrocity. Your head will hurt.

Oh yeah, and in my best moments I have a wicked sense of humor and irony.

But it does bug me, after all these novels and stories, that I still haven't written something truly unique. It feels sometimes like I'm stuck in training for the Main Event... waiting for that Big Idea to come along, a concept or "vision" or whatever, that inspires a book no one else could have written. In the meanwhile, all I can do is try to put a fresh spin on old ideas. It's not enough.

On the bright side, my best work may yet lie in the future - at least I hope so. I won't run out of ideas in a while. Now there's a funny thing: I have this heap of unfinished books, some of which are probably never going to be completed!

I'm waiting for something to arrive in my mind - or rather, for my writing mind to arrive at a certain place - where I've never been. It might be a matter of maturing as a person: once I've formed a family, I will be able to write about families in a convincing manner.

Then again, only a fool would beget children only as sources of inspiration: "Come on, you damn no-good kids... say something cute! And you, wife, start going on and on about 'finding yourself' and how 'unfilfilling' our marriage is. How am I going to get my Pulitzer Prize if you don't work with me, people?"

Just you wait... one day I shall write my Great Novel. Everything else I write is just waiting around for the Big Thing to happen. And if I should happen to produce a good book before that happens, it could be dismissed as sheer luck...

-A.R.Yngve
January 30, 2004

As I'm writing this, I'm working on the two final chapters of my thriller WOMAN WITHOUT VEIL. And my next book, which you probably won't see on this website, is planned to be entirely in Swedish. Of course I couldn't stop myself, and wrote a whole bunch of new stuff in English anyway, when I ought to get started on that Great Swedish Novel. Anyhow...

I had a minor disagreement with a friend recently, about writing in one's mother tongue. She claimed that "writing in the language you were born with always produces the best result." She also said: "It will always show if you're not writing in your mother tongue." I disagreed - respectfully, for I didn't want to hurt her feelings - and muttered sheepishly: "English doesn't belong to the English anymore."

My mother tongue is Swedish, and I still write fiction mainly in English. Is this wrong? I don't think so.

Naturally, one should start out with writing in one's "first" language - it goes without saying. Equally obvious is that one should get a formal education in any foreign language one intends to use. (And I did, but I dropped out of the English department before I could graduate.)

However, my friend was expressing the following view: that the English spoken and written by native English-speakers is the genuine tongue, and nothing ever comes close to capturing it. Now, this would have been true before the 20th century. But when English became a "global language," the native speakers - to put it bluntly - lost their claim to it. It is no longer valid to diminish the value of English literature (and non-literature) written by non-native English speakers, simply because "global English" is everywhere. There are now more people speaking and writing English on a daily basis than there are Englishmen and Americans combined. The latest Nobel Prize winning writer, V.S. Naipaul, comes from Trinidad and grew up with Indian parents.

Does this mean we should abandon standards of grammar, style and overall quality? Of course not - and neither does V.S. Naipaul. I mean that we should accept the reality of "global English" and admit that it will spawn its own literature. You can see it taking shape on the Internet right now, for better and worse. I like the accessibility of writing in English, the range of my potential (and real) readership. I like the rich vocabulary, the many dialects and colloquialisms in various parts of the English-speaking community. I feel at home with depicting non-native English speakers in fiction, because I'm one of them. I am familiar with business English from my day job. I learn new things all the time from more experienced English writers.

And: I am not in the least ashamed of the "Swedishness" showing through in my writing style, no more than an Irishman should feel ashamed of how he speaks English. But when it comes to grammar and spelling, I proofread my sentences several times over. Sloppiness and individuality should not be confused...

A.R.Yngve
June 4, 2002

1. The Never Ending Argument
I am in an endless argument with a guy over this issue.

He claims there is no real difference between science fiction and fantasy. I say there is. (Maybe he just enjoys ticking me off by disagreeing. Bastard.) This disagreement seems widespread in our culture and indicates a serious rift in mindsets. And it may be far more to it than just the issue of ”literature” or ”fiction”. Bear with me.

So this guy, let’s call him Ron, argues thus: ”Science fiction is just fantasy under another label. In fantasy, the mode of transport may be a flying dragon, while in SF it may be a spaceship. Same thing, different terminology.”

Wrong, Ron. The difference is this: Dragons are inherently unreal. Spaceships (in some form or other) MAY actually exist – and do exist. Even with genetic engineering, you could never create a dragon with the supernatural abilities of fairytales or Chinese (or Norse) myth.

Wait, there’s more than one side to this argument. Ron not only equates science with magic, he is on to something... many people do think of science as a kind of magic. How many can explain how their own TV set works? Can you? If you see David Copperfield do the ”disappearing” act on TV, isn’t there a part of your mind that wants to believe it’s ”real” – that magic could, or should be possible?

”Magical thinking” is a familiar kind of regression, another aspect of magic in general. There’s a period during childhood, in which we see the world as alive and ”conscious,” and aware of us – sometimes in a malicious way:

”Ow! I hit my knee on the table. Stupid, bad table wanted to hurt me!”

Occasionally, grownups fall back on this early mode of thinking:

”Ow! I hit my thumb with the hammer. #¤&¤%&** hammer!”

But we grow up... we realize that the world is indifferent to our needs, that inanimate objects do not wish us harm, that objects are not ”charmed” - and that just because we want something to be true, wishing alone won’t make it so. We grow up. We wise up.

Right?

Naaah. Of course we don’t! Deep down we still want to bend the rules of reality, still want to occupy a special place in creation, or seek comfort from random chance in ”lucky charms” and talismans.

2. ”Nooo! I am not a metaphor!”
But I digress... OK, so we’ve established that science fiction attempts to stay in the realm of the possible – as in possible in the future, or given certain conditions, mostly natural laws (which may be more or less specific). In fantasy, on the other hand, anything goes. Now we come upon an interesting phenomenon... even though fantasy in principle has a much greater imaginary potential than science fiction, this is not the case with most fantasy we see in books, films, and other media. In fact, most fantasy (and its traditional forebears, myth and fairytale) follows rigid, predictable patterns.

All sorts of genre conventions abound in fantasy, with over-obvious roots in the human psyche and its archaic obsessions. It would take too long to count them all, but surely you’re familiar with (deep breath):

-The fire-breathing dragon that guards a treasure;
-The young man who is given a Quest to heal the King/Save the Land/Rescue a Princess;
-The Old Sage/Wizard possessing arcane knowledge of elemental powers, and great wisdom;
-The Wicked Witch who eats children and exudes sexuality...
-The Magic Object (ring, sword, scepter, shield, what-have-you) that provides supernatural aid when most needed...
....and so on.

Most fantasy reads like crude psychodrama; all the Freudian clues are laid out in the open. A young man saves a young princess from an evil old man? Not exactly subtle, is it?

Almost as striking is the reluctance of many fantasy fans (and writers) to admit that fantasy is really all about metaphor and symbol. This denial borders on the pathological. (The granddaddy of modern fantasy literature, J.R.R. Tolkien, repeatedly denied the existence of hidden messages or metaphors in his The Lord Of The Rings - though that may have been his way of ”keeping the metaphors hidden” and thus more effective. I think the book hides a lot of stuff between the lines – childhood traumas, the horrors of World War I and the loss of friends in the trenches, a nostalgia for pre-industrial Britain, an unresolved unease with women... and old-fashioned racism of the 19th-century imperial Pro-British kind. So shoot me.) Though no one denies the presence of metaphor and symbolism in science fiction, one of its most basic elements is speculation of what could be. That is: spaceships may be phallic symbols, emblems of escape and freedom etc. – but they are also solid modes of transport, that come with physical limitations. You won’t have to worry about the magic dragon running out of fuel, but your rocket ship will.

Ah, but this guy Ron would disagree. He’d say: “A dragon is just a dragon, A.R. It’s not meant to be a symbol, just fanciful entertainment, an exercise in the imagination! It’s fun!”

OK, then why the restrictions? Why the obvious repetitions of themes that have been with us since the Stone Age? Why this anxious denial that only a “literal” reading of the text matters?

The peasants who told the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” – the real gruesome version, not the Disneyfied one – to their children must have had a pretty good idea of what they were really telling. It was a kind of cautionary tale with several levels of interpretation. Imagine that instead of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, the parents would say to their little daughters: “Child, in about seven years those boys who are currently not interested in you will change, and try to steal your virginity – without which it might get impossible to get you married, a fate worse than death in our society. So you must be cautious in the future, when grinning young men with white teeth want to take you alone into a secluded place... like into the forest, for instance.”

If you have an IQ above room temperature, you see that this direct approach just won’t work. Telling kids the unvarnished truth about their future is like.... well, like science-fiction to them. They won’t get it. So you tell that stupid story about the wolf, over and over, making it just exciting enough to keep the kids listening... and then gradually, the concealed wisdom of the story sinks in like a subliminal message.

3. The One Ring, Sponsored by Microsoft
If modern fantasy is the fairytale of our industrial age, it deals with other symbols. (Virginity is no longer as highly prized as it was in the 16th century.) So instead of wolves threatening peasant girls, we get winding tales of lone men and women with immense powers, striving to uphold order in a society full of strife and tension, struggling to possess the magic sword or ring that will give them the power to overcome the forces of darkness. Magical talismans and weapons are manufactured in these tales (such as the Rings of Mordor), not created by elemental forces (such as the sword Excalibur, given to King Arthur by a water elemental, the “Lady of the Lake”) – because modern people are not as awed and frightened by nature as feudal peasants once were. We have lost the sense that nature is inherently magical. Instead the “magic” now seems to reside (metaphorically) within our own technology.

To put it bluntly: Today’s fantasy is the myth of glorified consumerism and personal career. Replace the magic ring/sword/dragon with a mobile phone/gun/car, and you get the picture. A bit crass, really.

All these things given, I prefer science fiction to fantasy (or, at least, to what fantasy has become). Fantasy comforts me too much, tries too hard to say “I’m OK, you’re OK, the world is OK.” Science fiction provides a greater variety and scope of vision, and dares to unnerve the reader with challenges such as this one:

“Are you real?”
“No.”
(From my novel Alien Beach, available on this website.)

All Columns (c) A.R.Yngve 2001-2004. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced without permission.