Saturday, December 06, 2008

Patricia Cornwell gets tough on violent crime
Despite a track record of colourfully visceral thrillers, Patricia Cornwell is upset that crime fiction is becoming increasingly graphic

by Alison Flood blogging in The Guardian

It seems that the queen of the forensic thriller, Patricia Cornwell, doesn't like the direction crime fiction is heading in – it's too graphic, apparently. Well she should know – she started it.
"It's too realistic in many ways, it has transitioned into something rather frightening, something rather savage, and maybe it needs to revert back a little bit to being a little more deductive and civilised and cerebral," she tells books site Galleycat, in an interview about her new book Scarpetta.
But until Cornwell came along in 1990 with her first Kay Scarpetta thriller, Postmortem, in which Scarpetta investigates a series of "sex slayings", crime fiction wasn't nearly as gruesomely explicit as it is these days.
To read the full pce link here to the Guardian online.

1 comment:

Vanda Symon said...

I agree with her on the violence in crime fiction, and isn't it interesting that in the Guardian piece they cite women writers as being disciples. Ian Rankin got into an almighty spat with Val McDermid on this very subject last year.

Personally, I prefer to leave a lot to the readers imagination.