The key word falls on page 121: “meta art”.
That's what Scott Thornley's novel The Good Killer is about.
And that's quite disturbing news, because rarely does theory hustle draped as a thriller lead to a respectable result.
Most of the time it's about giving that warming feeling of knowing to a small circle of insiders who can't stop nodding while reading.
In the present case that means: the murderer reproduces works of art with his victims, he photographs them, finds it avant-garde and offers the photographs to a gallery in Paris.
For example, he arranges two corpses in a mansion based on Honoré Daumier's lithograph "Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834".
The tableau is rounded off by dolls with red cotton oozing out of their wounds.
Kai Spanke
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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The investigator, Superintendent MacNeice, immediately senses that the perpetrator can only be caught if the role model for this second-order scene can be identified.
However, the subsequent research sidelined everything that could help the book get off the ground: psychological depth, risky decision-making situations and, paradoxically, the sophisticated discussion of aesthetic questions.
This is evident, for example, as soon as an investigator states that the murderer is walking "a fine line between fiction and reality".
Baffled colleagues, blank faces.
The viewer, she explains, “automatically assumes the blood isn't real, it's tomato sauce or something.
Most people would probably think that these aren't real corpses, but actors pretending to be dead."
Appearance and reality, authenticity and staging, life and death, truth and lies, all of them are not uninteresting, but in MacNeice's fourth case they are conveyed to the reader in an almost Danbrown-like way.
At least amateur photographer Thornley does not go into media theory, because then a seminar on the basics of semiotics and categories such as "aura", "symbol" and "index" would be opened.
Instead, Dr.
Ridout, Curator of Cliché Contemporary Art, said: “Besides the gory aspects of his work, this work is conceptually well thought out.
Basically, it's about theatre.” The latter also applies to “The Good Killer”, but not the former.
Thornley, who grew up in Canada and ran an education and health consulting firm, sends his ornithologically-savvy hero, who not only talks to birds but also to his dead wife, to see therapists more often.
However, the sessions have no action-motivating function.
Chekhov's demand that nothing should be irrelevant in literature, that no episode should remain inconsequential, makes sense in crime novels in particular, but is constantly undermined by Thornley.
MacNeice is not on the verge of collapsing, nor is he going to freak out or do anything grossly stupid.
Yes, he drinks too much grappa, yes, he has strange dreams, but his somewhat precarious state of mind is thanks to an author who thinks he knows that crime heroes should suffer from a somewhat precarious state of mind.
The finale (sword, guts, carnage) amplifies the previous bestiality and augments it with action sequences that fundamentally change the tone of the book.
Good, one could say, someone wants to understand art as autonomous and show that it knows no borders.
A thriller, especially one about aesthetic issues, has to reckon with the visible sides of evil at any time just as much as with changes of register.
However, this clashes with the well-behaved quoted motifs from art history and the education dip that is touched on again and again.
At the end, a policewoman quotes from Shakespeare's "Henry V" on the battlefield.
The colleagues are moved.
“That was wonderful,” says one, “I mean that seriously – really wonderful.
Who is this from?” Of course, the question is not appropriate, but it can happen in the heat of the moment.
Scott Thornley: "The Good Killer". crime novel.
Translated from the English by Andrea O'Brien.
Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2022. 399 pp., br., €16.95.