Gertrude Stein once said fiction that merely related events was no longer interesting in an age of ubiquitous mass media. But Stein remained fascinated by literature, specifically the detective novel, which she considered the singularly modern fictional form. When the man or woman in question is dead from the start, you’re done with mere events before page one. Furthermore: “In real life … it is the crime that is the thing the shock the thrill the horror but in the story it is the detection that holds the interest.”
My own novel The Fountain in the Forest is an experimental thriller that begins with the discovery of a brutally murdered man in a Covent Garden theatre. Detective Sergeant Rex King becomes obsessed with the case, but as he explores the crime scene further – so the jacket copy goes – the mystery deepens. The book is the first part of a trilogy exploring the legacy of a decisive period in recent British history – 90 days in 1985 between the end of the miners’ strike and the Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge, reputedly the largest civilian mass arrest in the UK since the second world war.
I was particularly inspired by the literary experiments of Georges Perec, who was part of Oulipo – the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature – a group that applied mathematical and other constraints to writing. Specifically, The Fountain in the Forest was written using an Oulipian “mandated vocabulary”, where all or some of the words used to create a work must be predetermined in some way. In part, this was a means of re-immersing myself in the language and habits of the mid-80s. It is no spoiler to reveal that my trilogy is not only mapped against those days immediately following the strike, but that each chapter has to be written using as its “mandated vocabulary” all of the solutions to the Guardian quick crossword from that same day in 1985.
Of course not all thrillers and detective novels are “modern”, let alone experimental, although the genre is nothing if not innovative. In order to limit the field here, I have taken my cue from Stein’s idea, but also sought out novels where watching the experiment unfold is perhaps as essential and thrilling as the detective story itself.
1. The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet (translated by Richard Howard)
In Robbe-Grillet’s debut from 1953, a disorientating prologue sets the tone for the novel proper, presenting in stripped-back prose a fractured map of events and encounters before, during and after (though not necessarily in that order) what may or may not have been the murder in his study of Mr Daniel Dupont, a retired political economist. Into this maelstrom of feints, refractions and reflections strolls an investigator, special agent Monsieur Wallas. And that’s when things get really interesting.
2. L’Amante Anglaise by Marguerite Duras (translated by Barbara Bray)
Human remains are found distributed across the French railway network. By studying railway timetables, the police discover that the murder must have taken place in the town of Viorne. In Duras’ sparse novel, secret tape recordings are played back to the three main suspects. “How about the difference between what I know and what I say – what will you do about that?” someone asks, on page one. The author’s answer? “That’s the part of the book the reader has to supply.”
3. Cities of the Red Night by William S Burroughs
A lament for the pirate utopias that preceded the French and American revolutions, Burroughs’ ninth novel is a dual narrative in which the investigation into an American youth missing in Greece is echoed and amplified by an erotic backstory tracing the origins of a mysterious, sexually transmitted virus. With wisecracking “private asshole” Clem Snide as our guide, this is Burroughs’ most accessible novel.
4. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
In City of Glass, part one of Auster’s trilogy, detective novelist Daniel Quinn receives several late-night phone calls, wrong numbers, from somebody seeking a private investigator named Paul Auster. He decides to play along and soon finds that he has been hired to protect a Kaspar Hauser-like child abuse survivor from his criminally insane father. For all of Auster’s games, this remains a glorious detective thriller with all the feints, reversals and sheer page-turning velocity that you’d find in a classic Ellery Queen mystery.
5. Cast in Doubt by Lynne Tillman
Horace is a slightly washed-up gay American novelist – author of the “Stan Green” detective series – living the expat life in 70s Crete. As well as “tossing off” the Stan Greens, and planning a more ambitious historical novel, he is also keeping the rather bitchy journal that we find ourselves reading. When his young friend and neighbour Helen suddenly disappears, it is Horace’s cue to do some investigations of his own, but unfortunately he is no Stan Green.
6. Off Duty by Victor Headley
The pioneering novelist’s early 90s debut Yardie flipped the racism of the Richard Allen Skinhead novel format in the uncompromising story of D, a desperate young Jamaican drug mule making a name for himself in London. A decade later, Headley’s brilliant fourth novel Off Duty opens with a Jamaican detective and reformed bad boy Carlton Nash, AKA “Skidder”, visiting London for his former police-force mentor’s wedding. Kaleidoscopic and dynamic, this is a lively classic, which was underappreciated at the time, and is currently out of print.
7. Rip-off Red, Girl Detective by Kathy Acker
Bored with life as a stripper, Rip-off Red decides to set up a detective agency in New York. But her first mystery begins on the plane before they even get there, when Red finds herself kissing the woman in the next seat. Acker’s influences, including Stein and Burroughs, are close to the surface in this posthumously published early work – her first novella – but the many ecstatic sexual encounters also read like the work of a radical, Blakean visionary.
8. Pulp by Charles Bukowski
Bukowski’s last book is a note-perfect Chandleresque noir, in which the first woman who walks into private eye Nick Belane’s downtown LA office is a literal femme fatale: Lady Death herself. She hires Belane to find the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who should have died in 1961 but is still hanging around in Hollywood bars and bookshops. Pulp is a pure delight: intensely literary, self-reflexive, and packed with tributes to other writers, yet as lightly drawn as a late Picasso.
9. Anicet or the Panorama by Louis Aragon (translated by Antony Melville)
Available in English translation for the first time, surrealist poet Aragon’s iconoclastic first novel is a dadaist roman à clef, with characters loosely corresponding to real individuals, including Rimbaud, Picasso and Charlie Chaplin. Dialogue throughout is deliberately artificial, but Anicet contains one real exchange, with writer “Jean Chipre” (based on the poet Max Jacob), who decries writers “who always use three words where one will do”. Jacob/Chipre continues: “Hold back from facile development, limit yourself to expressing an image without pursuing it … Kill description.” Sound – and modern – advice that could almost have been written a generation later by Robbe-Grillet.
10. A Void by Georges Perec (translated by Gilbert Adair)
Perec’s wittiest novel was famously written without using a single letter “e”; hard enough if the anticipated outcome were a nonsense rhyme. But it is not just the letter that has disappeared: Perec’s family were Polish Jews living in Paris, most of whom did not survive the Holocaust. Knowing this, the extraordinary joie de vivre of this novel becomes unbearably poignant, and Perec’s deliberate volubility is an act both of generosity and defiance.
- The Fountain in the Forest by Tony White is published by Faber & Faber on 4 January 2018, priced £14.99. It can be ordered from the Guardian bookshop for £12.74, including free UK p&p.
