Synopsis
Pete Bowland was busy doing nothing that summer. Long, stiflingly hot, lazy days stretched ahead of him. Then she called.
'Listen, Pete... you know that funfair, up at the recreation ground... I thought we could all meet up... You know, for old times' sake.'
But, where there are old times, there are old tensions. And as secrets, bitterness and jealousies resurface, five old friends are plunged into the worst night of their lives...
Teenage readers will find it impossible to tear themselves away from this dark, tense and gripping new novel from award-winning Kevin Brooks.
Interview
The Celebrity of Murder
One of the central plot lines in my new novel Black Rabbit Summer concerns the sudden disappearance of two very different sixteen-year-olds: Stella Ross, a beautiful teenage celebrity; and Raymond Daggett, a slightly strange-looking, and somewhat tormented, young boy. Both characters are known to the narrator of the story (Pete Boland), and when both of them go missing at the same time, Pete is drawn into the police investigation and becomes inextricably linked to their disappearance.
The contrast between the two missing teenagers, both physical and social, allowed me to reflect on some of the cultural aspects of real-life high-profile crimes that interest me. In particular, I wanted to look at why certain crimes become high-profile crimes when others of an almost identical nature don't, and to what extent this process is influenced by our received perception of the victim and/or suspect.
It was one of these real-life high-profile crimes – the murder of TV presenter Jill Dando – that provided part of the initial spark for the book. There were two main aspects of the Jill Dando case that really got me thinking. The first of these was the undeniable effect that the victim's celebrity status and physical appearance had on every aspect of the case – the media and public reaction, the police investigation, the overall sense of horror and outrage. This, of course, was in no way unexpected (and my interest is not in whether it's right or wrong); I simply found it intriguing how our emotional and practical response to the taking of a human life depends, to a certain extent, on what the victim does for a living, or what they look like. Or even simply how nice they are. Why, if you're a good-looking TV celebrity, is your murder somehow more heinous than the murder of anyone else? Why does your murder elicit more sympathy and more police resources than the murder of, say, a plain-looking, and perhaps not very pleasant, nobody?
Whether we like it or not, this bias regarding physical appearance is often a factor in cases involving missing/murdered children. It's a very emotive subject, and those who dare to discuss it publicly do so at the risk of provoking public outrage and offending the victim's relatives (as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, did recently when commenting on the Soham murders case). But it is patently obvious that more media coverage is given to cases in which the victim or victims are engagingly photogenic than to cases of those who are not, and this gives the impression that more is being done to solve these crimes than others. This, in turn, creates added pressure on the police to solve these crimes. So, in a sense, this media-inspired perception (that these crimes are somehow more deserving of increased police attention) becomes a reality: the police really are doing more to solve these crimes than others.
We only have to look at the inordinate amount of media coverage given to certain high-profile cases to realise that this is true. The fatal stabbing of Damilola Taylor, the Soham murders, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Yes, of course, they're all tragic, they're all horrific ... but are they any more horrific than the countless tragedies that don't get saturation media coverage? And am I wrong to assume that these 'lesser' tragedies don't get so much coverage simply because the victims have the wrong kind of face, the wrong kind of smile, the wrong kind of photograph to show on the news?
Maybe I am wrong. But I think it's still worth thinking about.
The other aspect of the Jill Dando case that fascinated me was the arrest and conviction of Barry George for her murder. This was a conviction based almost entirely on the fact that the suspect lived in the same area as Jill Dando, and the widely-held belief that he was an 'oddball'. Barry George was a weirdo, a loner, a social misfit, and that – it seems to me – was enough to convince the police, the media, the public, and the jury, of his guilt.
Again, I could be wrong. Perhaps everything I've read about the case was incorrect. Perhaps the police know something we don't. And perhaps Barry George really did pull the trigger. It's perfectly possible. And when his retrial is heard, perhaps we'll finally find out the truth. Whatever happens, though, the fact remains that Barry George's social and physical strangeness was portrayed by the media – and to a lesser extent by the police – as a quite reasonable basis for his guilt.
A final thought about the media coverage of high-profile crimes. While I was writing Black Rabbit Summer, a series of murders was taking place in and around Ipswich. I was living in Manningtree at the time, which is no more than ten miles from Ipswich, so I was very aware of what was happening – in both the media world and the real world – and somehow this sense of proximity really brought home to me how influential a role the modern media plays in all aspects of high-profile crimes. There were two aspects in particular that intrigued me: the murder-as-entertainment factor, and the symbiotic relationship that develops between the media and the police.
The murder-as-entertainment factor is nothing new. It's been the same for centuries; we've always loved a gruesome murder. But what has changed in the last few years is the sheer amount of news available, and the key thing about this 24-hour news programming is that it has to live up to its name: it has to be 24 hours of continuous news. So instead of getting our murder-as-entertainment news in summarised reports at six o'clock or nine o'clock on the TV every night, or in the newspaper the following morning, we now get every possible angle on the story, as it's happening (or not happening), every second of every day. We get absolutely everything: the continuous speculation, the daily police press conferences, the expert opinions, the interviews with local residents, profilers, acquaintances ... and we know it's all utterly pointless. But we still watch it anyway. And the police know we watch it, which means the killer might watch it, so the police use the media as part of their investigation, which means, in effect, that we, as viewers, become part of the investigation ourselves. Which in turn makes it even more entertaining for us. So we watch it even more ...
But then, finally, the killer is caught, and suddenly there's no more news. No more police conferences. No more information. And it's then that we realise that none of it was real. It was all just something we were watching on TV. And we forget all about it.
Until the next time.
Kevin Brooks, January 2008
Product details
Format : Hardback
ISBN: 9780141381459
Size : 135 x 216mm
Pages : 448
Published : 07 Feb 2008
Publisher : Puffin
Black Rabbit Summer
£10.99
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