KEY POINTS:
They say money can't buy happiness but I doubt that they, whoever they may be, are speaking from experience.
That "can't" seems a little dogmatic to me. It smacks of those dinner party debaters who think that if they declaim with sufficient vehemence, everyone else will back off on the assumption that only an expert would be so adamant. Clearly, money doesn't always buy happiness: most of us probably have an acquaintance or two whose apparently enviable circumstances don't appear to have put a song in their hearts, but perhaps some people were born to be sour.
"Truth is stranger than fiction" is another maxim that's often trotted out with thudding finality, as if it almost goes without saying. It's not as bold a statement as it might appear since so much fiction is based on reality.
This is partly because we like our escapist fare to have at least a veneer of actuality. Given that practically everyone is a conspiracy theorist these days, it's not surprising that creators of fiction pander to the widespread suspicion that there's a more sinister dimension to what appears in watered-down form in the news.
Paradoxically, however, art sometimes imitates life because what does appear in the news, especially in other parts of the world, is so sordid, sinister or otherwise sensational. (Headline-making crimes in our own little backwater all too often bring to mind Hannah Arendt's aphorism about the banality of evil.)
Carl Hiassen, the master of the belly laugh crime novel located in a setting where mere grotesquerie is ho-hum, says his books simply reflect Florida's day-to-day reality. He didn't have to invent a gaudy, corrupt, freak-infested melting pot with a booming narco-economy because it already existed.
This fictionalised reality might also reflect a paucity of imagination. Lacking the imagination to anticipate what the future holds, we embellish it after the event. September 11 is a case in point: the American authorities knew the conspirators were taking flying lessons but lacked the imagination to figure out why.
Since then, endless terrorist scenarios have been canvassed in intelligence briefings, think tank reports, newspaper articles, books, and movies but common sense and logic suggest that the next great terrorist coup will be the one no one saw coming.
Just as generals are always fighting the last war, publishers and film producers are always trying to hitch a ride on the commercial wave, so a lot of fiction is inspired by other fiction.
Ever since Thomas Harris unleashed Hannibal Lechter on a receptive public, the crime/thriller genre has been dominated by serial killers and their adversaries, the haunted shrinks and iron-gutted forensic pathologists who get inside the monsters' minds by studying their methodology, particularly the signature flourishes of their butchery.
Fictional serial killers are even stalking our sleepy suburbs, although they're mercifully thin on the ground here. At a literary lunch this week there was some debate over whether the genuine article has ever operated in New Zealand.
Someone came up with a woman in Hawkes Bay who supposedly befriended elderly people, persuaded them to alter their wills to her advantage, knocked them off and donated the ill-gotten gains to a charity devoted to cats.
It sounded strange enough to be true but then the source was a writer who might have been trying out his latest idea on the rest of us.
While the USA is the spiritual home of the serial killer, the crime writer James Ellroy has observed that there are many more serial killers at large in American fiction than on American streets. This is in keeping with the well-established trend of novelists and script-writers extrapolating from reality to portray America as a far more violent, dangerous, and pitiless place than it actually is. Truth may indeed be stranger than fiction but it has a much lower body-count.
When it comes to fictionalising reality, Polish writer Krystian Bala got a little too cute for his own good.
He's just been convicted of murder partly on the basis of a scene in his novel Amok which, according to the prosecution, bore an uncanny resemblance to a real-life murder in 2000, the original investigation of which was abandoned for a lack of leads.
Although Bala insists he's innocent and critics have dismissed his book as an obscene, pornographic rant, he seems eminently qualified to be both a writer and a murderer. According to an article in the Observer, he has a high IQ, a massive ego - he compares himself to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Salman Rushdie and William Burroughs among others - and a narcissistic disorder that makes him incapable of empathy.
He's been jailed for 25 years, so finding time to write will be the least of his worries. Poland must be awaiting the follow-up with queasy anticipation.
