Four new crime stories demonstrate that the genre represents a valuable record of society's darkest fears and preoccupations, writes Declan Burke

ARGUABLY the most seductive, and perhaps even compelling, asp-ect of contemporary crime fiction is its relevance. As with the best journalism, the best crime writing speaks to us of where we are now and how we are coping with the indignities that assault our notions of civilisation.

Rape, for example, has been with us in fiction since The Iliad, although Homer tended to celebrate his triumphalist male protagonists and gloss over how a woman might feel about being subjected to such gross violation.

It's in the realms of modern crime fiction that you will find rape's most authentic documentation. Linda Fairstein's latest novel, Killer Heat, which features her recurring heroine District Attorney Alexandra "Coop" Cooper, has for its backdrop the story of how a rape victim continues her fight for justice decades after she was assaulted, and how modern methods of crime detection allow her to hope that the judicial system will finally do the right thing.

Fairstein is the best- selling author of nine novels to date, and offers fairly pedestrian prose and a narrative style that is perfunctory. What gives Fairstein her edge, however, is her 'platform': the years she spent as Assistant DA of Manhattan's sex crimes unit.

Crucially, Fairstein offers a rare blend -- that of the hard-nosed ex-professional privy to the gritty details of rape and its emotional, physical and psychological consequences, those harrowing details wrapped in a populist brand of story-telling that brings such details to a mass-market audience.

Indeed, Killer Heat has as its subtext the historical silencing of rape victims by a judicial system dominated by men, and the ways by which such anachronistic mechanisms have been challenged and overthrown by women operating within the system. There can hardly be more relevant and urgent issue to be addressed by fiction.

Cody McFadyen is another woman operating in a male-dominated milieu. Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter is probably the most notorious fictional serial killer of recent times, and serial killers tend to be, for the most part, male, but McFadyen has her heroine, FBI agent Smoky Barrett, take them on where they live, by invading their minds.

The crimes visited on women in McFadyen's third offering, The Darker Side, do not involve sex. Instead, the serial killer, 'The Preacher', targets women because they have "sinned" and murders them because they fail to admit the extent of their 'sin'.

When Barrett takes on the case, she quickly discovers that 'The Preacher' has been dispensing his particular brand of justice for more than two decades.

The serial-killer novel is the latest incarnation of the timeless bogeyman story, the faceless evil that haunts the human imagination for its ability to strike at random.

The psychopaths and sociopaths who roam the novels are not bound by the rules and norms of society; their motives are singular, perverse and impossible to predict.

It can be argued that McFadyen and writers like her are providing a cathartic experience for readers, their stories threading through chaos to arrive at the illusion of closure, as the bogeyman is led away in chains and the heroine rides off into the sunset.

It's a simplistic argument, and presumes that crime-fiction readers are childishly susceptible to happy endings; that by some magical process, reading about the defeat of a protagonist translates into the potential defeat of evil in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps some readers do read for a quality of transient and patently illusory redemption, although crime readers tend to be far smarter than they're given credit for.

Few of Cody McFadyen's fans believe that the author is a messiah announcing a new world order where lethal male instincts will be eradicated. It's much more likely that they simply take Smoky Barrett as a refreshing role model, a woman who is prepared to stand up to vicious and murderous men and beat them at their own game, and particularly men like 'The Preacher' who take their perverted cues from such historically misogynistic institutions as religion.

In his debut novel, Bait, Nick Brownlee offers a different take on the continuing assault on civilisation. The story is set in modern Kenya, not long after the post-election blood-letting that in late 2007 convulsed what had been one of Africa's most stable and affluent democracies. Brownlee's crime-fighting protagonists are an ex-London cop Jake and Jouma, a Kenyan policeman, with the latter providing the most poignant insights:

"He'd watched young men, many barely older than boys, descend into unspeakable savagery with breathtaking ease, in the blink of an eye almost; and it made him realise that the barrier that held back such raging bestial instincts in a man must be so paper-thin as to be almost invisible. As churches burned and mothers wept for their dead children, Jouma had concluded that, if all that was good was not to be consumed by all that was evil, this flimsy barrier had to be protected at all costs."

In a nutshell, that paragraph is as good a summation as is needed of crime fiction's raison d'etre.

If journalism is the first draft of history, then crime fiction -- less measured and detailed than journalism, perhaps, but capable of exploring a greater emotional depth and width -- is its second.

Bait, with its backdrop of the sex-slave trafficking of young African girls for a European "market", is a conventionally told tale that none the less burns with an incandescent anger at how post-colonial Kenya is still being abused by the European powers-that-be. It speaks volumes for the issues currently facing contemporary society that Andrew Klavan's latest novel, Empire of Lies also deals with the attempt to protect an innocent young woman from sexual predators. Klavan's protagonist, Jason Harrow, allows himself be enmeshed in a web of deceit when an ex-girlfriend contacts Jason to tell him that she's concerned about the kind of company her daughter is keeping.

It's not long before we discover that the daughter, Serena, may be Jason's daughter, and that her future hangs by a thread. Drug-taking, under-age boozing and casual sex are just some of the unhealthy lifestyle choices the teenager is making, and Jason finds himself forced to intervene in her life when Serena reveals that she has been a witness to a murder.

So far, so conventional, but Jason Harrow isn't a typical crime-fiction protagonist. Amateur sleuths, and particularly those of the male variety, tend to be hard-bitten loners with a fondness for the bottle and women whose standards are as low as their expectations. Jason, on the other hand, is a clean-living family man with much to lose should his dirty little secret emerge; Klavan gives this scenario an added twist by creating something of an evangelical private investigator:

"But because I'm a political conservative and, even worse, a believing Christian, the networks and The Times and all the rest have consistently depicted me as small-minded and pinch-hearted, a bigot and an ill-educated fool ...

"The Times, for instance, has never once written about me since that day without referring to me as 'conservative Christian asshole Jason Harrow'. Of course, for Times readers, the 'asshole' is understood."

Naturally, the strength of Jason's 'Christian conservatism' is severely tested during the novel, not least by the double standards he applies to himself. In an election year in the US, and particularly given the electoral power of the religious right that proved so crucial to the Bush administration, Empire of Lies makes for a challenging and thought-provoking read.

It's also an excellent example, as is the case with Killer Heat, Bait and The Darker Side, of crime fiction's capacity to get behind the stark headlines of the first draft of history, and to flesh out the stories that speak to us of our times.

Declan Burke is the author of 'The Big O'. His blog, Crime Always Pays, is dedicated to Irish crime fiction

- Declan Burke