I’m not sure that the term claustrophobic crime novel is a genre unto itself. If it isn’t it should be. Claustrophobia, whether of the physical or mental kind, is the engine that drives some of our best novels. Thrillers and crime novels in particular. This is because every well-done claustrophobic novel is also a psychological character study told entirely or, almost entirely, from the point of view of the novel’s protagonist; and being inside someone’s mind in a claustrophobic situation – whether of their own making or created from external circumstances – can’t help but be thrilling, tense and unpredictable. In several of my own novels I have found it most effective to write from a single character’s perspective – whether from the first or third person point of view. What’s interesting for me as their conduit in a sense is to observe through a character’s mind how they will react as the situations/encounters I put them in become tenser and/or more fraught. Who of us can say who we really are – the heroic, or anyway upright, person we want to believe we are or something less – until we’re in a crisis situation? That unpredictability and sense of a protagonist revealing to me their truest nature at the same time that I am writing the story that is forcing them to do so, for me defines the art of writing and is what makes doing it exciting.
Read the full article: https://crimereads.com/5-great-claustrophobic-crime-novels/
No comments:
Post a Comment