everything from sadists to arse-lickers and grasses

epub or mobi

A major function of art is that bores should consider it to be mad; indeed, the challenge in art is that it should remain beyond the control of bores. In other words, art should depict bores as insane - in exactly that way that the controlling bore, by definition, cannot afford to see himself.
The killer effectively shrouds his identity from everybody, including himself - for those who feel blindly that they have something to hide, because they cannot identify what it is, have to create events that they have to hide. Writers of crime fiction spotted this vaguely from time to time; the trouble was that none of it (because there was commerce to be considered, how much would the public take?) went far enough into the killer's mind, so that authors preferred to dramatise his sensationalist exterior, which also excused them from having to analyse it - an error which persists. This has understandably given crime fiction a bad name as far as the serious reader is concerned, in spite of the efforts of certain authors (Thompson, Goodis, Chandler, Himes and Ellroy) to rescue it from this error. To be more exact, the black novel does not rescue crime fiction, but replaces it.