On true crime & crime fiction

My uncle’s over at the moment. He’s a strange man at worst and a hero at best, but basically he’s dying and everybody’s minded to ignore it.

Anyway, he’s full of trivia and smokes a lot of pot, and since the two are mutually exclusive I get told a lot about the world and all the manly things he’s done and all the things I should do and lots of lurid things I probably won’t ever.

He’s the only man I’ve ever met who looks cool with a walking stick, a permatan and lung cancer.

Apparently he wants me to write his life for him but I tell him I’m too busy writing a semi-sequel to Colin, which is also polite code for ‘It makes me anxious’. Only he laughs at that and puts ketchup and mint sauce on his new potatoes.

But he’s got these magazines, my uncle; these detective magazines. He loves them. They’re all over the house.

I can’t tell him they’re creepy and I’m not even sure where he finds them because they’re significantly dated in appearance and look like they’ve been designed with fingerpaints.
The covers always feature these stock photos of 80s women experiencing some kind of TERROR and they’re splashed with the usual pullers about MURDER and TRUE CRIME and one, pointedly, saying, MY MUM’S BODY FELL OUT OF THE CUPBOARD.

I plonked down and had a flick through one earlier and it struck me that I’m no fan of crime writing. I mean I should be, but I’m not. My mum reads them — those anonymous-looking ones Tesco sell by the bucketload that make you jealous because you’ll never sell books by the bucketload from Tesco — and my gran does too, and then my uncle reads these things. And what they do in these detective magazines is they get a gruesome real-life crime and fictionalise the events so the murderers come across as quite polite and gamely till they’re hacking somebody, the victims totally useless, and the police these brazen heroes who’d sooner eat your face than talk to it. I don’t get it.

I don’t get crime fiction altogether.

I also have stark memories of watching Miss Marple with my gran. She seemed much larger then, though I don’t mean fat like pigs. Stark because I didn’t want to watch it; I wanted to play with my Lego. She said, ‘you’re always thinking about the next thing, and never enjoy the thing you’re doing.’ And I haven’t ever forgotten that – mainly on account of nothing’s changed.

She had all the books so essentially she was cheating but we watched this programme and some posh twerp got drowned in a bobbing apple bowl. Riveting.

All the way through I was convinced I knew who the killer was and all the way through she’d sort of smile wanly at me and say, ‘wait and see’. Course, it was the maid, that filthy street urchin, and why didn’t I see it as a socio-political allegory. She must’ve had two scenes. Two fucking scenes in an hour’s drama, and I was supposed to work that out. So I told her, I went, ‘That was unfair, there was no chance,’ and my gran, she shook her head and said, sagely, ‘No, Matthew – that was Agatha Christie.’

The point is maybe I’ll write a crime novel one day. That’ll show them. I’ll make sure everybody knows who the murderer is from page one and the twist will be there’s no twist.