A note to photographers out there. I don't pose with guns. Ever. Not even silly toy plastic ones of the kind some snapper brought along to a photo-shoot in Singapore once, hoping to spice up the usual boring author picture with something a little 'exciting'.

There's a reason for this. Yes, I depict violence in my work, graphic violence at times. But I do it to shock, not titillate. I <em>hate</em> violence, and I hate guns in particular, as do my protagonists. As one of them puts it in one book, they may have to use force but when it results in someone getting hurt or killed they feel a sense of failure. They were supposed to do the job differently, to get a result without people getting hurt.

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Not every author feels this way and that's their prerogative. In some books, perhaps most popular fiction, violence is meant to be thrilling. When the hero beats up the bad guy the reader becomes that hero, exacting justice on behalf of a bloodied innocent world. Order is restored. Good defeats evil till the next bout. That kind of reader-as-hero model has worked well for centuries, and will continue to do so for many to come. Then there's the Quentin Tarantino theory of violence <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/6975563/Quentin-Tarantino-violence-is-the-best-way-to-control-an-audience.html" target="_blank">which I'll leave you to discover here.</a>

Tarantino may go to the movies to see violence but I don't. Nor is extreme brutality something I want to be central to my own writing. My attitude to violence is simple: it's reprehensible, usually avoidable, an extension of the dark side of human nature that we would all, in ideal circumstances, like to suppress. Critics sometimes moan about the amount of violence in modern fiction and film, arguing that it provokes similar acts in real life. I've never been much impressed by that argument, though there are certainly movies and books out there that turn me off through excessive brutality. The arts reflect society, not shape it. The idea that 'the pen is mightier than the sword' is pretty ridiculous. The pen didn't topple Hitler.

The fictional bloodshed that does worry me is the old-fashioned kind, bloodless deaths, gentle poisonings among the aspidistras in the hothouse, Hopalong Cassidy shooting some bad guy who doesn't even bleed, just clutches his shirt and says, 'Ah, you got me.' That kind of fake, sanitised violence was understandable in its day. When Agatha Christie was writing in the 1930s crime was something that happened to other people and those who committed it were exterior creatures, beyond the norms of 'civilised' society. What is often called classic crime tends to treat criminals the way gardeners treat green fly. All you have to do is identify them, locate them, spray on the right kind of insecticide/justice and everything turns right again.

It's hard to write that kind of violence today except as pastiche. Crime is everywhere. Most of us will know of someone who's been the victim of violence, perhaps even murder. In the classic crime template all that is required for justice to be enacted is the simple matter of identification. The villain is unveiled, he puts up his hands, the police come long, a trial ensues and the world is put to rights. It's hard to make a convincing case for that kind of process in the 21st century. Today justice is truly blind. Even if a perpetrator is found he or she may well walk free through failures in process or the intervention of very clever lawyers.

Ordinary decent citizens no longer feel safe. And at the same time more and more start to think, 'If they can get away with it, why shouldn't I?' The world's a greyer, less certain place. When I depict violence I try to reflect that. So my violence may well not be the work of 'criminals'. It's unpredictable, hard to understand, random, even unplanned. And it has consequences, lasting consequences, that affect all of those involved. I can't pretend that murder is simply a plot device, not when violence and crime, fear and a lust for retribution are everywhere around us, though you're all entitled to feel differently, of course.

Here are a few hazy ground rules I try to apply.
<ul>
	<li>I don't linger, for two reasons. Given that I disapprove of violence it would be morally wrong for me to be prurient about its infliction. On a -- possibly more important -- practical front I want the violence, if it appears, to be deeply shocking. I happen to believe that is best achieved by introducing it very quickly and making it go away very quickly too. A prime example of my approach are the deaths of two important characters in the first and sixth Costa books, <em>A Season for the Dead</em> and <em>The Garden of Evil.</em> I still get email about those, and it still says the same thing, 'I never saw that coming and it took my breath away.' Precisely.</li>
	<li>I avoid extensive physical detail. It adds nothing to my kind of book to be told what tendons are severed, what part of the brain is lying on the pavement. I'm squeamish in real life. I don't want to know, and I don't see why the reader should. This may be different for those writing from, say, a medical point of view.</li>
	<li>I always ensure that I describe the emotional effect of the violence on those involved, the person who inflicts it, the victims, those who've witnessed the act and those charged with bringing the perpetrators to justice. Particularly the culprit sometimes because I know from experience as a journalist that extreme violence <em>does</em> affect many of those who use it. They can be as shocked by what it achieves as anyone else. And if they're not -- as happens with a character in the forthcoming <em>Death in Seville</em> -- that needs to be depicted and explained too, since it says something about them.</li>
	<li>There are a lot of myths out there -- fairy stories about 'closure' and the like. One such fable is the idea that people, police officers especially, become 'inured' to violence in the sense that it no longer affects them. I think it's true that they may not let its effects show after a while. But they're there usually, even if they're invisible to the person concerned. And again if they're not that tells you something about the individual concerned.</li>
	<li>I use violence sparingly. The impact it has on the reader bears no proportion to the number of pages it takes up in a book. I well remember one book event where the moderator asked, as he was entitled, 'Why is there so much violence in this book?' I asked him, 'How many violent scenes do you think there are?' He said, 'Lots.' I went through it with him. There were just three, perhaps two and a half even. It's not the amount that matters, it's the impact. You can achieve more with half a well-written page than ten pages of graphic, gruesome scalpel-wielding.</li>
</ul>
That's my approach anyway. As always I'm not trying to preach here and tell people how to write. Merely explaining how I go about it. In many standard forms of popular literature violence is seen as a regrettable means towards a justifiable end. In mine there's a touch of that, but I want more. I want my characters to feel touched by violence, damaged and tainted by it. It may resolve the problem, but what interests me as much as the event itself is the aftermath, its cost and its consequences.

And that is why you'll never find a picture of me with a gun.