How would you like to spend time with some dangerous women?
This summer, I came across two recently reprinted series of literary crime fiction originally published around the millennium. My appreciation for the mysterious ways of Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt novels is documented, but these cult favorites – by authors who would become even better known writing in other genres – were new to me, and the initial installments of both blew me away with how fresh and vibrant they are.
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Elizabeth Hand’s 2007 noirish, “Generation Loss,” the first in her Cass Neary series, has been reprinted with in a beautiful softcover edition by London’s Influx Press along with followups “Available Dark” and “Hard Light” (and the fourth, “The Book of Lamps and Banners,” is available from Mulholland Books – with a blurb from Gran!). These gorgeously bleak new book designs, which feature stark black and white images of lone, lonely figures standing by the sea, were all I needed to jump in. (Not to mention how the coastal-inspired design maps its way across editions – swoon!)
Hand, known for “A Haunting on the Hill” and “Hokuloa Road,” creates a damaged, undaunted protagonist in Cass. A briefly celebrated punk photographer, she’s survived success, substance abuse and a string of strained relationships with women (and some men) and now scrapes by as a bookseller at New York City’s Strand bookstore. When she gets an odd but much-needed assignment to interview a reclusive photographer living on a remote island off the coast of Maine, she reluctantly agrees to take the job.
At times atmospheric, creepy, sexy and scary, “Generation Loss” not only has a story you feel compelled to follow, but a messy narrator who talks about the grotty late-night streetlife of mid-’70s Manhattan as the scene at Max’s Kansas City gives way to the punk rock at CBGBs as vividly as she describes what she sees through the lens of her Konica (namechecking a ton of photographers along the way such as Diane Arbus, Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe along the way).
In some ways, Nicola Griffith’s Aud Torvingen could not be more different from Cass Neary, except that Aud – who appears in 1998’s “The Blue Place,” 2002’s “Stay,” and 2007’s “Always” – is equally fascinating: queer, capable, a total badass. Recently republished by MCD/Picador, the return of Aud should be welcomed by anyone who loves a good book, as the rapturous reviews from writers such as Ivy Pochoda, Robert Crais, Lee Child and more suggest.
Reduced to bullet points, Aud could almost sound like a type you’ve encountered before – striking physical appearance, skilled in martial arts and combat, haunted by past experiences – but Griffith develops her into a unique character who could enliven a book in any genre. Throughout the story, which shifts from Atlanta to Norway and back, the author also slips in slivers of strangeness, such as Aud listening to the music of Diamanda Galás on the way to an appointment. (For background: A musical description of the San Diego-born Galás, who’s done admirable work on behalf of those with AIDS, describes her as “capable of the most unnerving vocal terror this side of grindcore movies” – so now try to imagine someone listening to that while sitting in traffic.)
I reached out to the author Griffith, who readers may know from her historical novels “Hild,” “Menewood” and “Spear,” and she was kind enough to respond to my questions about Aud.
Q. Many readers know you for your historical epics. How do you describe your Aud Torvingen crime series to newcomers to the books?
The three Aud books are novels of character, crime fiction that uses the classic tropes of noir — first-person narrator, fast-moving prose, corruption in high places and crimes of desperation in the urban underbelly — without being noir.
For me, noir is the horror fiction of the crime genre, in which the main characters constantly make things worse for themselves in a claustrophobic, ever-tightening spiral of doom. Whereas if I could emphasise one thing about the reading experience of the Aud books, it’s that they are a rush. A rollercoaster ride, a visceral thrill, full of both danger and delight.
Aud isn’t damaged or traumatised. She isn’t bitter or angry. She’s not in debt or an alcoholic. She’s an ex-cop who inherited enough money so she only has to work as a security consultant when she wants to. She’s young, and though she’s cool and collected, and uses deadly violence when the situation warrants it, she’s full of energy and revels in the pleasures of the body: food, sex, sun on her face, fine wine, great clothes, stunning music…
She’s most definitely imperfect — she makes one terrible mistake that costs her dearly — but in the end, she always wins.
Q. Lee Child compared Aud to his own Jack Reacher and Val McDermid likens her to Lisbeth Salander. Your work is rich in character in ways that some crime novels are not. How do you describe your own approach to crime writing?
I’m grinning, because when she’s working, Aud is a chameleon: She can appear as the girl next door one minute and an avenging angel the next. She’s not like any other character in crime fiction.
She’s the child of a Norwegian diplomat and a Chicago businessman, a rangy six-footer with very pale eyes. She can fit in anywhere — gliding between cocktails with the city elite to the seamy underbelly of the street, utterly at ease — but when we first meet her, she doesn’t belong anywhere. She holds herself apart, presenting a seamless exterior to the world. And then she meets someone who somehow sneaks past her barriers, and that seamless exterior begins to thin …
Q. Can you talk about the origins of the character?
Aud comes from a dream I had: a hot Atlanta night, and a woman sprawled naked and confident as a lion fast asleep on the carpet of an absolutely brand new and empty apartment—and wakes suddenly and completely to find a man holding a gun to her head. Between one breath and the next, she surges off the carpet and breaks his neck, snap, it’s done. Two seconds, from sleep to death. And I woke up thinking, Whoa, what kind of person could do that? And how did they get that way? I wrote these three books to find out.
It’s hard to say what my approach to crime writing is because these are the only crime fiction I’ve written (so far). Instead, I can tell you my approach to figuring out Aud. The novels follow her through a specific emotional arc: her internal journey from cool, seamless, self-contained and self-reliant distance to fully-rounded and connected human being.
Q. I read “The Blue Place” while also reading S.A. Cosby’s 2025 novel “King of Ashes,” both of which are set in and around Atlanta (and I occasionally found myself daydreaming about characters moving between the stories). What makes Atlanta (or the book’s other setting) a good locale for your work?
Setting, specifically the natural landscape, is my primary joy as a writer. I will find the beauty — the life — in every setting, whether the tiny flower by an icy lake, the swallows flying through a derelict industrial warehouse, or the awe of standing beneath ancient trees soaring overhead like a Gothic cathedral. I love imagining it: the scent of rain, the hiss of wind in leaves, the sudden glitter of a squirrel’s eye like an apple pip as it stares at you from the phone wires.
I began with Atlanta because I lived there for five years. To someone who grew up in the north of England, which is cold and windy and wet, and everywhere you look there is evidence of human hands on the landscape — the hill that’s actually a bronze-age barrow, the ruin of the medieval abbey beside the old Roman road running over the moors — Atlanta was exotic: bright, brash, hot, lush, loud, shiny and all new. A good place for Aud to remake herself.
And then I took her to Norway, because, first, it’s where she’s from, and I wanted to know how it formed her, but honestly, mainly because I’d never been and it was my excuse to research it and imagine its alien snowscapes and on-off, black-white, yes-no extremes.
You can learn so much about a character by moving them through a different landscape. Aud on the streets of Seattle notices and responds very differently to Aud building a log cabin in the Pisgah forest, in woods that have been there for, literally, millions of years. To be honest, I’d be happy to simply follow Aud about as she moved from one wildly different setting to another—but doing that while also watching her out-think, out-fight and out-manoeuvre Bad People and bring a small measure of justice to those who can’t do it for themselves is even better.
For more information about the series and her other books, go to Nicola Griffith’s website.
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