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Evil is everywhere, most especially, it seems, in bookshops and libraries, where death stalks the shelves. The crime/thriller genre of fiction has never been so popular, with publishers churning out an endless supply of novels about ritualistic slaughter, hearts being ripped out and bodies being skewered. And readers, it seems, are snapping them up.
English crime writer David Hewson, in Auckland to promote his latest two novels, doesn't think this obsession is anything new.
"The things I write about are good and evil, and the misty grey territory in between," he says. "All literature is about that, it always has been. If you look at Shakespeare you could very easily define a lot of his work as crime. I think we've always been fascinated by evil. Without it there would be no religion, no art, no nothing."
Hewson has a theory that during the Cold War we went through a period of externalising evil.
"There was a big rise in horror," he recalls. "Evil became this thing that was external to humanity, which is a real con because the most evil thing on the planet is us, anyway."
With the end of the Cold War, argues Hewson, this attitude changed and we went back to realising evil could quite easily be the person sitting next to us on the bus.
"I think what today's crime books do is try to address a very real world," the author says. "It's not tarted up, it's not crime in the old-fashioned sense."
Hewson is best known for his series of novels about Rome detective Nic Costa who, rather than being the classic alcoholic detective in a dirty raincoat, is young, perhaps a bit naive, and essentially a good guy.
The latest and fifth Costa novel, The Seventh Sacrament, is a pacey thriller with the detective struggling to solve the cold case of a missing boy whose father is seeking revenge against those he believes murdered him. The book takes us below the streets of Rome into a subterranean world that tourists never see.
Hewson stumbled across this world by accident. "I'm a moocher," he explains. "When I start thinking about a book I'm like a set designer thinking of how to stage it and the first thing I do is pick a part of Rome. So I was wandering round and kept noticing lots of underground entrances to things with little signs from the architectural superintendent of Rome that basically said, this is very interesting but you're not allowed in."
A former journalist, Hewson was convinced he could find a way to get access. He discovered an organisation of people with a passion for underground Rome and official permission to explore it. They showed him an incredible world of subterranean temples, houses and streets. Then Hewson began to read about the destroyed religion of Mithras, that was practised in these underground temples, and has woven his story around it.
Hewson had already published five novels by the time he wrote his first Costa book. Semana Santa was a huge success and made into a movie starring Mira Sorvino. However, the rest failed to do as well as he'd hoped.
"I thought my career was over," he admits. "I had one last throw of the dice."
He believes Costa saved his career and has a contract to write nine of the books in total, taking him up to 2009. "I hope it will go on after that. I'm not bored yet. I love doing them," he says.
Hewson's love of books dates back to his often lonely childhood. He grew up in the Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington where his parents ran a charity children's home.
"It was an old Victorian building and it was for kids who had never seen the sea," he explains. "In the winter it was closed so I was alone there with my elderly parents. We didn't have a car and it was a long way for me to get anywhere by bicycle but because it was a charity there was this library of interesting books, everything from Victorian novels to American thrillers. So I grew up reading an amazing array of books, which I think is what set me off."
Hewson also finds time to teach at writing schools in America although he confesses he's more of an anti-teacher. He is scathing of the writers' circle approach to producing a book, where authors sit round critiquing each other's work, and he questions the need for writing schools in the first place.
"They bring in all these American writers who go through the theory and then I'm the devil's advocate who slaps them round the head and says why are you at a writer's school instead of at home writing?" he laughs.
"If you want to learn to write then read books."
- Detours, HoS
