Why a Murderer as Hero?
By Joan Brady
I’ve been afraid all my life. Death, things that go thump in the night: that’s not even scratching the surface. You name it, I’m scared of it. People like me learn to keep this shameful secret hidden. So when the Chief Enforcement Officer of Devon’s South Hams District Council started in on the police caution – ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence…’ – he was annoyed at how calm I seemed.
My crime doesn’t matter. What does matter is that in the next year
and a half, the bastards summoned me to court 15 times. Fifteen times! At my first appearance I was a neat, tidy lady with
faith in the system. My impression of my ill-clad fellow felons? ‘Well, they’re all guilty, look at them,
slouching against the walls and glowering.’ Then I presented myself to the
court.
And then I understood.
Courts are ritual humiliation. Forget the comfy guff you’ve heard since
you were little. You’re guilty until proven innocent; five minutes as a
defendant and you know it’s true. By the time I got home, all I wanted to do
was kill people.
But there was something else, something crucial that I couldn’t quite
put my finger on. I started writing a thriller mainly to slake my anger but
also to figure out what the something was. My hero? A glowering felon full of
hate, but big, strong, young, male: all the things I’m not. Here was somebody
who could do some killing for me. I called him David Marion – my David – and I sent him against my Goliaths, the courts, the town
worthies, the local politicians, anybody in power. The way I figure it, politics
is the school playground all over again. The big kids beat up the little kids.
The skinny kids torment the fat kids. The most popular kid gets to run the
show. The only immune one is the tough kid, who slouches against the wall and
can beat the shit out of any of them.
The pity of this scenario is that when kids grow up, the tough kid
usually lands in prison. David Marion spent nearly 2 decades there. In America
– in the UK now too – many prisons are cash machines for multinational big
businesses. (The London Olympics owes
its private security cock-up to one such.) The state pays a private operator a
fee per prisoner for board, lodging and maintenance; profit begins with paring
outlay to the bone. Minimal food. Minimal upkeep. Minimal medical care. Minimal everything that
can be made minimal. Lots of money left over. And then just think, you have all
these functional men and women: why waste the labour? Get government contracts
to build more prisons, and use the prisoners to build them. Don’t stop there. Lease
inmates to private enterprise at Asian sweat shop rates: shoes, jeans, computer
parts, telemarketing. Learning skills for when they get out? Forget it. Beyond
prison walls, these jobs go to immigrant women. If people refuse to work,
increase their sentences, put them in solitary, deny canteen privileges. Profit
upon profit, this time from old-fashioned slavery.
So in The Blue Death, prison labour builds a vast canal to line
corporate pockets by shipping water thousands of miles from Canada’s Hudson Bay
to America’s middle west.
Exploitation like this is the logical final step in the humiliation
so painfully obvious to a defendant on a first appearance in court. The veil of
sanctimony and self-righteousness is clear at once too. But the human element in
the ritual is what took me a while. Towards the end of my appearances, I could
literally see – as well as sense – the Hogarthian debauchery, the lip-smacking,
delighted sadism of my accusers as they pleasured themselves with their power to
inflict their damnedest on me.
I made my hero a murderer to wipe that expression off as many faces
as I could.
Joan is the author of The Blue Death, out on 13th
September.
