Lives of Crime

Westlake: Yeah! It’s like they say in all the dictatorships: freedom comes from discipline.

NEWSWEEK: In the past few years the fiction best-seller lists have become monopolized by novels about crime and murder. What do you make of that?

Banville: I have a slight theo­ry: I think we live in a very vio­lent time, OK? The vast major­
ity of people have never seen any violence in their lives at all. They might drive their car
into their neighbor’s car and their neighbor might shout at them, but that’s about as near
as they get to violence. So there is this thing that we’re missing out on: “There’s all
this violence, all this blood and horror and so on. It must be quite fun. But I don’t see any.”
So they get it from books. And I notice this trend of thrillers that are absolutely dripping
with blood, serial killers slicing people up.

NEWSWEEK: Conversely, what’s good about “Ask the Parrot” [the most recent Parker novel] and “Christine Falls” is that they are, for lack of a better phrase, hu­man scale. Parker is a pro, but he never does anything that anyone couldn’t or wouldn’t do if they were in his line of work.

Banville: That’s exactly the point. I mean, my poor pathol­ogist doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time. A patholo­gist friend of mine gave me a little bit of advice about him be­forehand, and when he’d read the book I said, “What did you think?” He said, “You didn’t take any of my advice. You got it all wrong.” I said, “Oh, well, who cares?” But that is increas­ingly the case, the ultraprofessionalism of the leading char­acters. They have to know everything about everything.

It’s a funny business. I have to confess, there’s something quite touching about readers. They want something from you that you know you can’t give. But they want the priest in you. They think you know more than they do. I have a friend whose life is in constant turmoil. She’ll call me up and ask, “What am I going to do about this love affair?” or, “What about my daughter’s
education?” And I say, “I don’t know,” and she’ll say, “But you write novels, you must know
about these things.” I say, “Look, I can write about it, but I don’t know about it.” And she
cannot understand that! I tell her, “We concentrate on some­thing deeply enough to make it
lifelike, but it’s all to do with the concentration and the imagination, it’s nothing to do with experience. I sit in my room all day long doing this thing. I haven’t lived half as much as you have.”