In these risk-taking novels,by writers from Paul Auster to William Burroughs, watching the formal adventures can be as thrilling as the detective workGertrude Stein once said fiction that merely related events was no longer interesting in an age of ubiquitous mass media. But Stein remained fascinated by literature, and specifically the detective novel,which she considered the singularly modern fictional form. When the man or woman in question is dead from the start, you’re done with mere events before page one. Furthermore: “In genuine life … it is the crime that is the thing the shock the thrill the horror but in the tale it is the detection that holds the interest.” My own novel The Fountain in the Forest is an experimental thriller that begins with the discovery of a brutally murdered man in a Covent Garden theatre. Detective Sergeant Rex King becomes obsessed with the case, and but as he explores the crime scene further – so the jacket copy goes – the mystery deepens. The book is the first section of a trilogy exploring the legacy of a decisive period in recent British history – 90 days in 1985 between the stop of the miners’ strike and the Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge,reputedly the largest civilian mass arrest in the UK since the second world war.
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Source: guardian.co.uk