CRIME: John Connollyreviews Scarpettaby Patricia Cornwell Little, Brown, 500pp. £18.99
When the bulk of genre fiction is set against literary fiction, the former is usually found wanting. This is not because of any inherent flaw in genre writing, but because the battle is not being fought on a level field. Literary fiction is generally judged by the best of its kind, but genre fiction is frequently dismissed because of its worst. When literary writers nod, literary fiction itself remains untainted, but bad crime novels are used as an excuse to belittle the genre as a whole.
Patricia Cornwell is one of the best-known writers in mystery fiction, but the trajectory of her career has been disappointing. This, after all, is a woman who essentially popularised a new subgenre: the forensic thriller, in which a crime is investigated through the medium of the human body.
At a time when women in crime fiction were most often reduced to the status of victims, or sidekicks, or gifted amateurs, she created a female forensic pathologist, Dr Kay Scarpetta, who was believable and sympathetic, brilliant yet flawed.
Her early novels suggested new possibilities for crime writing, and paved the way for the current obsession with crime-scene investigation in the modern media, albeit a glossy, fantasised version of the real thing.
Unfortunately, what followed was the kind of precipitous decline in quality of output usually associated with some catastrophic injury in the workplace. At best, most of the later Scarpetta novels were mediocre, although compared to her departures from the series they came to seem like gems. The Andy Brazil novels, among them the awful Isle of Dogsand Southern Cross, made some misguided attempts at humour, but Cornwell and fun are uneasy bedfellows. Her work is lighthearted in the way that The Sorrows of Young Wertheris lighthearted. By the time a French "werewolf" began to make recurrent appearances in the Scarpetta books, it was clear that Cornwell had, quite literally, lost the plot.
Meanwhile, as her novels became less and less interesting, her personal life grew more and more fascinating.
In 1996, Cornwell was outed when the husband of Margot Bennett, the female ex-FBI agent with whom she had been having an affair, was arrested after taking his action against wife. Cornwell was cyberstalked for almost a decade by a man named Leslie Sachs, eventually winning damages and an injunction against him. Finally, there was her attempt to prove that the British artist Walter Sickert was, in fact, Jack the Ripper. She staked her reputation on it, and was said to have destroyed one of Sickert's paintings in her efforts to confirm his guilt.
Walter Sickert was not Jack the Ripper. And yet Cornwell continues to sell in huge quantities, her fans shrugging off the disappointments of previous novels as a new book appears on the horizon, hoping that this one might justify their continued faith in her. It is said that the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, but readers are not stupid and the relationship between writers and their fans is rather more complex than the faithful horde merely slavishly following a novelist's output.
In the case of a writer who is consistently underperforming, it comes to resemble the burden of a family dealing with a beloved relative who is trapped in a coma. The choice is to abandon the loved one entirely, or to return on a regular basis to offer encouragement and support in the hope that he or she may suddenly snap out of it and return to a productive existence.
For those who have been making regular visits to Cornwell's literary bed of sorrows, the news is that the patient is stable, but with only small signs of improvement; a full recovery still seems like a distant prospect.
The decision to name the novel after its central character suggests that this book has some particular significance for Cornwell and Scarpetta, the promise of a personal element to the plot that may reinvigorate the series. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Scarpettais just another Cornwell novel, and its nomenclature appears to have less to do with any turning point than with an apparent inability to come up with something more interesting as a title.
It begins with a dwarf, a little person. The dwarf's girlfriend is dead, and the dwarf may be a suspect in her killing. We are informed that the dwarf is very well endowed. This seems like an important detail, and the careful reader will file it away for future reference just in case the member in question later comes to play a significant yet surprising role in the plot: a penis ex machina, if you will. The careful reader will be disappointed. The dwarf's equipment takes no further part in what follows.
I could go on, but what would be the point? This is thin, overlong stuff, and dour to boot, with little in the way of orginality or tension, and characters who talk and behave less like real human beings and more like people in a Patricia Cornwell novel.
An incident of attempted rape from a previous book is miraculously forgiven; Scarpetta's niece Lucy, a kind of sapphic action doll, continues to be one of the most irritating figures in modern crime writing, and would make even the most enthusiastic of lesbians regard wistfully the tender embrace of heterosexuality; and, when the identity of the killer is eventually revealed, the reader will be left dazzled only by the murderer's ability to hold down a great number of jobs while still fitting in a little sexual sadism on the side.
For writers, reviewing books can sometimes feel like the literary equivalent of taking in laundry. Reading a book like this one brings little pleasure; having to criticise its author brings none, and may well come back to haunt me, but the genre deserves better. Cornwell is capable of it, as her early novels prove, but she no longer seems willing, or able, to produce work of a similar standard.
• John Connolly's most recent novel is The Reapers