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Why is crime fiction good for you? Well, it is about tragedy and our emotional responses to tragedy. It is also about moral choices and questions. It can be utterly serious in intent, yet still entertaining. It is still occasionally dismissed by the literary establishment as mere genre fiction – fine if you need something to pass the time, but not quite important enough to merit serious study. Yet ironically many literary novels (past and present) use the exact same tropes as crime fiction.

In the widest sense, of course, all fiction is good for you. It relaxes and entertains; it moves the reader from his or her own consciousness into that of other people in what can often be very different cultures and circumstances. In doing so it broadens our appreciation of human nature and the world around us. At some point in history, however, genre fiction became separated from literary or mainstream fiction, which are apparently more ‘serious’ in their approaches and ambitions. Yet it can be argued that early pulp fiction, such as that published in cheap popular magazines by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, is the child of the serials and stories written by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and others; stories which in their day were exemplars of mass entertainment, even sensationalist, like modern-day TV soaps, but are now regarded as literature. Dickens in his own day was not regarded as a particularly worthy writer; rather, he was a forerunner of the modern airport bestseller. This gives me hope that many of today’s crime and thriller writers will in the future come to be regarded as powerful moralists and stylists as well as tellers of fascinating tales.

If we examine the canon of Western literature, especially the novel, we find that the main ingredients of crime fiction – violence, sudden reversals, mystery, deception, moral dilemmas and so on – can be found everywhere, from the Greek epics to contemporary Booker Prize winners. Ask yourself what keeps you reading a particular novel. It is the need to know what happens next. Novels need to pose questions and problems which will be resolved only if the reader keeps reading. If an author makes us curious, we will keep turning the pages. In a sense therefore all readers are detectives, and the crime novel merely codifies this essential aspect of the pleasure of reading.

The great crime writer and critic Julian Symons (one-time President of the Detection Club) once described the folk tale Little Red Riding Hood as an interesting case of disguise and attempted murder. Murder, suspense and betrayal can be found throughout folk literature and in the classic texts of most if not all civilizations – from The Odyssey through Hamlet and King Lear to the novels of Ruth Rendell and P. D. James. The poet and detective novelist C. Day-Lewis thought of the whodunit specifically as a twentieth-century form of folk tale, while for his fellow poet W. H. Auden the classical detective story seemed an allegory of the ‘death’ of happiness. In real life, we seldom know what specifically killed off our happiness, whereas in the novel the seemingly random nature of existence is given an explanation – in crime fiction, death never happens without good reason and the causes of death never go unexplained (and are seldom unpunished).

Auden of course was talking of the ‘classical’ English detective story. Things have been changing more recently, the crime novel becoming ever more elastic. Consider the various terms by which it is known: the crime novel, detective novel, whodunit, suspense novel, roman noir, hard-boiled, pulp, police procedural, mystery novel, domestic noir, Scandi noir … even tartan noir. The reason for this proliferation may lie in confusion about the basic identity of the crime novel. This is a genre after all that would seek to include everything from the most basic puzzle-style story up to the likes of Dostoevsky. P. D. James tried to have it both ways when she described a successfully realized crime novel as combining ‘the old traditions of an exciting story and the satisfying exercise of rational deduction with the psychological subtleties and moral ambiguities of a good novel’. Certainly crime novels are intended to entertain. They are products of popular culture. As such they must turn a profit, for few institutions and publicly backed funders will subsidise them. Crime fiction may have literary aspirations, but its emphasis on entertainment ensures that these aspirations do not deter potential readers. Crime fiction is democratic in that it is accessible to all.

Before the Second World War, the crime novel in the UK reassured its readership that all would be well, that society might occasionally be shaken up (by some heinous crime such as murder) but that order would quickly be restored. A courteous and brilliant detective would bring elucidation and the guilty party or parties would be uncovered and sent for trial. The tight confines of this fictional universe, and the neat conclusions, provided pleasure to many but meant that the crime novel was considered as escapist literature, since real life seldom provided its own set of pat resolutions. In the United States, authors such as Raymond Chandler began to argue against such tidy (and mostly bloodless) confections. He wanted crime fiction to be a bit more cynical about human nature, creating a world of tarnished knights such as Philip Marlowe. Chandler sensed that what crime fiction really needed was a sense of the incomplete and of life’s messy complexity. The reader should go to crime fiction to be challenged by these realities. Practitioners in the UK began to realize this, too – gritty urban settings competed with rural idylls; good did not always triumph over evil; evil couldn’t always be explained away. In contemporary crime fiction the villains may escape justice altogether, or the reader may be invited to take sides with the criminal against the powers of law and order. There are even novels with no detectives and no mysteries, showing a world in which criminality, in the form of organized crime, operates openly and without apparent hindrance.

For many readers this came – and comes – as a refreshing change, because the crime novel has always been capable of so much more than simply telling a good story or playing an elaborate game with its audience. Crime writers throughout the world have known for years that the crime novel can be a perfect tool for the dissection of society. It’s something I learned very early on in my Inspector Rebus novels. I wanted to explore the city of Edinburgh from top to bottom, but also wanted to use Edinburgh as a microcosm for the wider world. I wanted to discuss politics and economics and moral questions and the problems we all face as a society. I realized that my police detective gave me a sort of all-areas pass. He could visit the various seats of power but also investigate the worlds of the dispossessed and disenfranchised. This has allowed me to explore themes of racism and human trafficking, the drug trade, various political upheavals, changing social attitudes, the rise of new technologies, our increasingly surveillance-driven society and so forth, without my novels reading as tracts or treatises. The adventure, the thrill of the chase, underpins the whole, but the story is no longer ‘just’ about that chase.

In spite of its exaggerations and heightened effects, the contemporary crime novel often tells us more about the world around us than do literary novels, many of which can seem introspective or focused on a narrow remit (an individual life; or the lives of a small interconnected group). Crime fiction tackles big issues, from corporate corruption to child abuse, inviting its readers to consider why these crimes continue to affect us, while also warning those same readers of new types of crime – as evidenced by the rise of the crime novel where the internet and social media are seen as a potential source of malevolence. The shadowy figure who steps out of a darkened alley in front of us has been replaced by an equally shadowy figure who threatens us via our home computer or mobile phone.

Writers such as Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Sarah Hilary, Eva Dolan, Mark Billingham and Adrian McKinty challenge their readers with stories that seem torn from the pages of this week’s newspapers and which make dramatic use of current technology, be it DNA analysis or CCTV. I’m not sure if they think of themselves as political writers, but there are certainly political elements to their themes and stories. These authors – and many others like them – see the roots of petty crime in abject poverty, in the current social problems of the UK. They also know how easily petty crime can escalate, and they often have a view to the larger (often invisible) crimes perpetrated by institutions and corporations. Their stories tend to be set in the urban here and now, allowing them to engage more readily with the world inhabited by their readers. Drug culture, youth problems and the alienation felt by many at the bottom of the pile are dealt with in their novels.

I chose Edinburgh as the setting for my books for similar reasons. It’s a city that visitors feel they can get to know fairly quickly, being compact and on the surface safe and civilized, with a wealth of historic streets and artefacts. In fact, it can seem a single homogenous entity with a castle at its core. Some of this conceit was exploded by Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting – and more especially by the hugely successful film that came shortly after. In my own first novel Knots and Crosses a serial killer is stalking the Edinburgh of the mid–1980s, and locals gather together to share their astonishment and outrage – it’s just not the sort of thing anyone associates with Edinburgh!

Except …

Well, the 25-year-old Ian Rankin who wrote that book had no grounding in the English whodunit. I had never read any Christie or Allingham or Sayers and had yet to discover Rendell and James. But I was doing a PhD on the novels of Muriel Spark, whose magnum opus, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, had taken me on an adventure into the world of the gothic, much of it Edinburgh-based and much of it grounded in reality. Miss Brodie tells us that she is descended from Deacon William Brodie, a noted gentleman. What she neglects to add is that William Brodie – a real-life historical figure – was a respected figure by day but a thief and rogue by night. He headed a gang which would break into homes, assaulting the unwary and stealing their valuables. Brodie was caught, tried and hanged – allegedly on a scaffold he had helped craft as Deacon of Wrights. Robert Louis Stevenson may have had Deacon Brodie’s story in mind when he wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, his short but potent novel focused on the question at the heart of all crime fiction – why do we humans continue throughout history to inflict terrible damage on each other? Stevenson chose (for whatever reason) to set his tale in London, but it is every bit as Scottish in its themes and tone as Spark’s much later novel, and both books perhaps owe a debt to an earlier, lesser-known work, James Hogg’s Edinburgh-based slice of psychological Grand Guignol, Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Just as Spark took me to Stevenson, so Stevenson led me to Hogg and his complex narrative concerning a young religious zealot who comes under the spell of a charismatic stranger; who convinces him that as a member of ‘the elect’ (and therefore bound for Heaven whatever he does on Earth) he should feel free to murder those he feels deserve it, including an elderly minister of the church and, eventually, his own brother.

We are never sure in Hogg’s tale whether the charismatic stranger is a psychopath, the Devil incarnate, or a fever-dream conjured up by a religious maniac. This ambiguity is central to much of the best Scottish literature, along with an interest in the doppelgänger. All three books suggest that human beings have within them warring natures. Sometimes we’re good, and sometimes bad. In my first Rebus novel I created an evil alter ego for the detective, in the shape of someone who had been almost like a brother but was now out to destroy him. I certainly had the battle between Jekyll and Hyde in mind as I planned the book. I even added clues that Rebus himself may be the serial killer terrorising Edinburgh. He suffers alcoholic blackouts and wakes in the morning unable to remember the night before, much as Jekyll does. In Rebus’s second adventure, Hide and Seek, I even play with the name Hyde in the title. (The book was originally going to be called Hyde and Seek.)

Many of the best contemporary Scottish crime writers learned from the same books I did, their work owing as much to Hogg as to Christie or Chandler. But several of us also proclaim a debt to William McIlvanney, a literary novelist, poet and essayist who, in the late 1970s, created Jack Laidlaw, a tough, streetwise Glasgow detective with a penchant for philosophy. Those books emerged just as the Scottish novel was having fresh life breathed into it by the likes of James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, writers sustained by working-class city life and by the trials and vicissitudes of characters often not given a voice in literature. This is something I feel the Scottish crime novel has picked up on – giving a voice to the voiceless. Crime after all is more likely to strike those who have little or nothing than it is those who are protected by wealth and power.

The mechanics of the whodunit – its narrative conventions – do not really interest me as a writer. What interests me is the soul of the crime novel – what it tells us about ourselves and our society, what it is capable or uniquely qualified to discuss. My favourite crime novels tackle big issues, but always with reference to the effects of the investigation upon those doing the investigating and those affected by the crime, up to and including the initial victim. We are all inquisitive and curious animals, learning through questioning, and crime fiction touches this deep need both to ask the questions and (hopefully) to begin to touch on possible answers.

Crime fiction also enters dangerous territory – murder, rage, revenge – and so stirs up emotional responses we might not otherwise feel. Reading is not a passive experience in the way sitting through a film or TV show is. We watch violence on the screen, but seldom feel it in our heart. A well-executed narrative description can make us feel the pain of the sufferer, while also putting us inside the head of the inflicter. In a world made largely safe, crime fiction provides the sensation that we may be on the edge of danger. It heightens our basic survival instincts and gives us a primal reminder of the cave and the predator. And yet we read these books in our largely murder-free communities. There is little demand for crime fiction in a war zone. Once the conflict has died down, the crime fiction appears, to try to explain to us what just happened. You see this right now in Ireland, in the brilliant novels of Adrian McKinty, Stuart Neville, Brian McGilloway and many others. And in Africa, in everyone from Deon Meyer to Oyinkan Braithwaite. Just as the Scandinavian crime novel tells us so much about the social issues of that region, so writers in India such as Anita Nair are beginning to use the whodunit to explore issues such as child exploitation and sexual identity.

It seems to me there’s not much that is out of bounds to the crime novel, which is perhaps fitting, since the spirit of the crime novel is anarchic. We are absurdist writers, writing in the realms of satire and irony, from the ‘cosier’ end of the spectrum (owing much to Jane Austen, as realized by authors such as Reginald Hill, P. D. James and Val McDermid) to the harsher, derisive ironies and dark exaggerations of a Derek Raymond, Philip Kerr or David Peace. In satire, prevailing vices and follies are held up to ridicule, and the crime novel is the perfect vehicle for this, dealing as it does with larger-than-life characters whose weaknesses will soon be revealed, all set in a society largely ill at ease with itself. Of course, this also makes the crime novel ripe for satirizing, and plenty of authors have had fun deconstructing the likes of Hercule Poirot or the hard-boiled gumshoe. Michael Dibdin’s sublime The Dying of the Light comes to mind, as does Tom Stoppard’s clever stage comedy The Real Inspector Hound. More recently, Anthony Horowitz (The Magpie Murders; The Word Is Murder) and Steve Cavanagh (Twisted) have played with the crime novelist as anti-hero. Literary authors, too, have been attracted to the crime genre down the ages, either by plundering or paying homage. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a favourite – the monk/detective’s name is even William of Baskerville! Muriel Spark turns the conventions of crime fiction on their head in her short, shocking novel The Driver’s Seat, which was itself influenced by the nouveau roman, especially in the hands of Alain Robbe-Grillet, several of whose experimental novels were shaped as whodunits. More recent literary successes include Eleanor Catton’s Booker-winning The Luminaries, which has a murder mystery as its narrative engine. Nor is children’s fiction immune. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are constructed as traditional whodunits, full of untrustworthy characters, reversals, mysteries, twists and revelations. Little surprise that Rowling, post-Potter, has gone on to fresh success as a writer of crime novels for adults.

The whodunit is, however, the broadest possible church, able to embrace the macho blood-and-guts nihilism of a James Ellroy and the gentle humanity of Alexander McCall Smith’s Ramotswe stories. In the stories of the past, however, there was a tendency for the irrruption of violence to lead to resolution (the unmasking of the culprit) and a return to the status quo. These days, it is harder to imagine everything settling back to ‘normal’ after an extreme act. Extremism has visited places we never imagined it would. Murderous acts seem to happen out of the blue – rare though they still are. The murder mystery these days seldom ignores this. As Muriel Spark herself once said, ‘We should know ourselves better by now than to be under the illusion that we are all essentially aspiring, affectionate and loving creatures. We do have these qualities, but we are aggressive too.’

In dealing with these aggressive qualities in the human animal, crime fiction provides both a salutary warning and the catharsis common to all good drama. The tight three-act structure of the crime novel (crime–investigation–resolution) pays tribute to the fact that we humans hunger for form and a sense of closure. Yet within those confines all human life plays out. We readers can explore cultures of the past, present and (very occasionally) future. We can visit countries and regions new to us and see the world through the consciousnesses of myriad others. We can have a multitude of adventures, experiencing the danger of chaos and coming face to face with the ugliest manifestations of evil and depravity as we dice with danger and the threat of imminent demise. And, in the end, haven’t we sentient creatures always been obsessed with death? It’s coming for all of us in some shape or form. Crime fiction gives us a way of exploring some of the implications, while still managing to have fun in the process.

So you see, crime fiction really is good for you.

From Ian Rankin’s belief in the soul of the crime novel, it’s a natural step to consider the moral energy and compass of the genre, subjects that have preoccupied members of the Detection Club from the days of Chesterton and Ronald Knox to the present. James Runcie, son of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, has (like Chesterton) not merely created a hugely popular priest detective but also thought deeply about the implications of his writing.