In a typical outing for the Viz character Victorian Dad, the eponymous character spends three-quarters of the strip imposing ridiculous old-fashioned strictures on his modern family, then becomes overly excited by a table leg and wanks himself into a coma.
The protagonist of Accidental Crimes, Conrad Nield, is a tutor at a teacher training college. He has old-fashioned educational and social ideas. On a work trip, something repressed erupts; he makes gross passes at women, goes to see a pornographic film, picks up a hitchhiker at whom he makes another gross pass, and then dumps her in the middle of nowhere. Because there’s a serial killer of hitchhikers around, he comes to the attention of the police. He lies to them, his lies are uncovered, things spiral, and by the end of the book he’s lost his job, his wife, and his dignity.
It’s just as crude as Victorian Dad, but not as funny. Nield is an eminently contemptible character. He’s cowardly, weak-willed, self-absorbed, priggish, cruel to his students, awful to his wife, terrible in bed; above all, a dreadful anachronism in his social and educational environment. We’re given ample evidence of all these flaws, and it’s clear early on that he’s going to pay a price for them. We’re just waiting to see what it is: wrongful conviction for multiple murders, or merely multiple humiliations. The murders themselves are grim and incidental. The police solve the case, almost accidentally, but the focus is entirely on what that means for Nield.
It’s unclear how the reader is meant to feel about all this. Nield is not in the least sympathetic, but he’s so obviously set up for his fall, and the fall is so heavy, that satisfaction or schadenfreude seem just as inappropriate as compassion. Relief, perhaps, that he’s just humiliated, not actually sent to prison? But that would require at least some degree of sympathy. One wonders why an author would write a book so tightly focussed on someone they evidently dislike entirely; someone who is, really, made exactly to be disliked, a construction of contemptible characteristics. Obviously, writers of crime fiction often write about unpleasant characters, but there’s a difference between (for example) Rendell’s forensic, dispassionate description of her psychopaths and Hutton’s dripping disdain for his creation.
I suspect the answers lie in authorial biography. For nearly 20 years, Hutton was himself a lecturer at a teacher training college, one which underwent various mergers and institutional upheavals during his time there. The office-political manoeuvrings that accompany such upheavals figure large in the plot of the book. It’s also replete with illustrations of how one should or shouldn’t treat trainee teachers under one’s tutelage. Given all this, it’s hard to escape the impression that Nield’s character is derived directly from that of a colleague, or perhaps colleagues, that Hutton really did not like. Furthermore, Hutton only published two novels; this was his second; it came out two years before he retired. With that in mind, one can see Accidental Crimes as a kind of revenge fantasy, an end-of-career reckoning with Hutton’s work enemies. The biography is sketchy, so this can only be speculation. Perhaps Hutton was himself the old-fashioned teacher, the social Victorian: perhaps this is an exacting self-portrait. But if the late-age revenge theory is right, his targets will surely have read this award-winning novel, and will surely have recognised themselves. Just imagine the atmosphere at the retirement party.