Plus ça change...? by Cathy Ace

Reading: What difference do you notice between the prose in crime novels that were written twenty years ago and current ones?  Do you think the writing has gotten better? Are the subjects different?

My first response to this question was to work out what year it was 20 years ago. Apparently it was 1998, but that can’t be right, because 1998 was just yesterday, wasn’t it?

There was all that talk about Y2K being the End of Times, so we’d better all spend the whole of 1999 partying like the artist formerly known as Prince, just in case we went out with a Big Technological Bang at the end of the century. And, while we were at it, we were told to squirrel away cash at home just in case the world didn’t end, but all the ATMs and electronic tills didn’t work any longer. That was just a couple of years ago – right? No? Hmm.

So, to this week’s question. I’m going to give my response a British spin, because I think I’ve got a better basis for comparison that way.

When it comes to the use of language, I don’t think there’s been a huge shift in the prose between the dialogue passages, but there has been a gradual emergence of different voices over the past twenty years, and those voices have been allowed to speak with an authenticity of vocabulary that I believe was – often, though not always – lacking. I don’t mean that just colloquialisms are now more prevalent, but that also what’s being spoken about and the characters doing the speaking have changed. It’s more realistic, more “current”. And that’s a good thing.

Crime fiction tackles some truly dreadful topics – and that applies to even the coziest of cozies, as well as the expectedly visceral thrum of a Martina Cole novel. So why not allow “real” voices to speak of such things? Rather than the massaged vocabulary of BBC Radio 4, let’s have the East End of London on the page (the old one, not the recently gentrified and sanitized one). So many British authors have taken this route, and moreso within the past twenty years.

And when it comes to topics…yes, murder is still there, but I enjoy the contemporary twists on motive and method that we see these days, as well as still having a soft spot for “Golden Age” poisonings at dinner parties.

Is it “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” (roughly translated: The more things change, the more they stay the same)? Maybe. But let’s not forget that Christie used the language of her day, and tackled contemporary topics (eg: Poirot is a refugee from Belgium; much is made in many of her books and stories of the scourge of drug addiction, the class system as she saw it through her lens) with her readers in mind, so maybe change is what’s required to allow authors to achieve that same end – relevance to their readers.

I'd be honoured if you'd consider reading my work - you can find out about it and me here: cathyace.com