I’ve known many people who survived their childhoods by
disappearing into books. Tucked away in a corner, out of harm’s way, immersed
in another world of there not here. From toddlerhood onwards kids love fantasy,
of talking pigs, rabbits and unicorns, a world inside a magic tree where danger
never lurks, graduating through witches and warlocks, into rom-coms and super-heroes.
Fantasy and fiction
are an essential way of coping with a disappointing reality, whether in dreams
or writing - to give us a sense of control. This is my world, I can order it as
I please. What the shrinks call omnipotence and insist we should grow out of after
age three. Some of us, probably most of us, never do.
I grew up reading
everything I could lay my hands on, courtesy of the local library - classic
fiction, Zane Greys (cowboys in the wild west), bleak holocaust stories (don’t ask
me why I was attracted to or indeed allowed to as a middling teenager); with
detective murder mysteries as a constant, being the family’s staple diet. 
Killer and corpse
tales always seemed a strange choice for respectable, church-going types. Yet
Agatha Christie is the world’s best-selling novelist, latest count 2 billion of
her books sold. The blood and gore must
satisfy an atavistic longing or fear that gets no outlet in a humdrum existence,
which may stem from an unpalatable psychological truth not much acknowledged
Freud skewed
everyone’s thinking with his sexual obsession and the Oedipus Theory. The real starting
point of the Oedipus myth was the father’s desire to kill his son (an
intimation of his future mortality) with the collusion of the mother. Somewhere,
buried deep in our core, we fear being killed from day one.
How do we cope? We invent
a good guy. He/She only appears after the first body turns up dead but at least
after a neatly ordered series of clues, insightfully followed, the antagonist
gets his comeuppance and can do no more harm. So order, at least in crime
fiction, is restored and life feels safe again. It’s one of the reasons why
there is such outrage from fans when a beloved hero gets bumped off in a fantasy
drama. Shouldn’t happen. It shafts a spear into our (delusional) sense of invulnerability.
Enough of psycho-babble
for one day. But interesting all the same.
Buy my new crime thriller BY the
LIGHT of a LIE
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