Literary crime, or just plain slumming?

Mark Timlin, writing for the Independent on Sunday (no link yet, alas) goes on a major offensive attacking those writers who think that switching gears from literary fiction to mystery will win them fans within the genre, when folks like Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter when he's writing more literary-minded stuff) know via instinct and craft how to do just that:

Hunter/McBain did the almost impossible feat of changing horses in midstream, and since then a number of writers have tried to do the same. These writers get great reviews and disappointing sales. They take a squint at the best-seller lists and see them full of books about serial killers, gangsters and good cops, and say to themselves: "Blimey! I can do that." Or more likely: "Good heavens, I wonder if I put my mind and talent to work on this subject I could have a hit." Because a literary writer will never use one word when half a dozen will do. There's not a lot of white on the page with these folks.

Take Martin Amis. I read London Fields because I heard it was literary crime at its finest. I guessed the culprit on page 18 and had to plough through another 450, full of people with ridiculous, jokey names, to find that I was right. Then there was a book called Night Train written as an American woman cop, about which the less said the better.

Timlin goes on to single out two writers in particular: Robert Edric, the Booker Prize winner currently completing a crime novel trilogy, and Susan Hill, whose foray into genre fiction was met with mostly disappointment and yawning:

Now don't get me wrong. There's no faulting the writing of either of these novels. I'm sure grammar and syntax are all present and correct. But who cares? Not me. It seems that both these novels are aimed at people who think that reading crime fiction is beneath them. They are written without any tension or energy, and with no love or understanding of the genre and what makes it tick. My advice is to save the money you might spend on these two long, uninspired volumes and go find a paperback of McBain or Chandler, or any one of 100 crime novelists who manage to pack more thrills and excitement, character and plot into a couple of hundred pages with plenty of white visible, and probably never got an award in their lives.

I don't much want to beat the dead horse of literary vs. crime fiction and whether one's better or worse than the other blah blah blah, because it's kind of like arguing about politics or religion--nobody really wins in the end. But I will say that those people who take the time to understand the conventions and mess with them to create something altogether different gets a big thumbs-up in my book. That's why I'm a big fan of Jonathan Lethem, who isn't just paying homage to the detective novel in his books, but also throws in sci-fi, fantasy, comic book, and even science elements in his novels. Jonathan Carroll's books could be viewed as thrillers, but they are so far afield of what's typical that he creates something near-unique each time out. I could go on with examples, but ultimately, the point--which lord knows I've made over and over--is that I want good books of any stripe. While literary novels tax different parts of my brain than crime fiction does, the combination--never mind non-fiction, any other genre, or any other realm of the arts--engages my brain as a whole. Who wants to limit their brainpower? Not me.

Comments

[Jim Winter]

My favorite was when a certain "odorless" writer told the crowd she read literary fiction because it was "subversive."

Ah! Someone else who doesn't cotton to the intellectual cola wars.

[Jenny D]

NIGHT TRAIN was surely one of the weakest novels I have ever read. Ever. The voice was so unconvincing and also--surprising, considering it was in theory playing around with the noir format--it didn't seem to have any plot whatsoever.

But I must stand up for LONDON FIELDS! Yeah, you know pretty soon what's going on and who did it. Just like if you read Dickens' OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. But the mystery isn't the main point--they're really big novels about cities, with a large cast of characters. I wouldn't really say, even, that LONDON FIELDS represented a literary author trying his hand at a detective novel.

It's silly when people claim to be adopting aspects of "genre" fiction without living up to the constraints and standards of that genre, sure, and I share this guy's suspicion that sometimes they've hardly read more than a handful of that kind of book. It is especially offputting when you think they're doing it to try and step up their sales, which suggests a kind of contempt for the reader. However, it seems to be fair enough for writers to experiment in good faith with aspects of different genres, even if they don't come up with books that are as consistently satisfying as the best detective fiction.

[Fiona]

I actually rather like literary crime - and I certainly don't think it's a case of "a literary writer will never use one word when half a dozen will do. There's not a lot of white on the page with these folks." - that's just a lot of nonsense. Ian McEwan's written several novels that are essentially crime novels (although admittedly they haven't been styled as such), and they're more Rendell-psychologicals than Rankin-type procedurals, but his prose is very spare indeed.

Right now I'm reading Julie Myerson's "Something Might Happen" (longlisted for last year's Booker) - and it's very good indeed. Although I am very annoyed by the blurb, which is at pains to say "this is not a crime novel" - indeed, it says just that, as if distancing itself from something distasteful. Far worse than "literary crime" is literary crime which tries to pretend it isn't. The truth is that if it WERE styled more as a crime novel, it would sell more copies.

I've also noticed that this year there've been a slew of crime novels (Mo Hayder's Tokyo, Boston Teran's The Prince of Deadly Weapons to name just two) which say very proudly that they're a "literary thriller". I'm not especially fond of that, either.

If it's good, it's good, and that's the bottom line as far as I'm concerned. Myerson's book certainly is.

[Donna]

I have absolutely no problem with books that are supposedly literary or books that supposedly aren't (although if anyone tries to make me read for a second time the so-called (by my old French lecturer at least)literary masterpiece that is Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie, I shall shove the toe of my pointy boot somewhere painful). As everyone has said, all I want is a bloody good read and I don't care what it's called. It can dress in a pink tutu and call itself Bubba as far as I'm concerned. But what REALLY bugs me is when reviews or blurbs, or, heaven forfend, the author themselves, tries to distance their book from the crime fiction genre as though it's something embarrassing that Great Aunt Gertie did at the dining room table. And I hate that annoying phrase 'transcending the genre'. Why does it need to be transcended? Crime fiction writers produce some brilliant stuff. I've said it before elsewhere ad nauseum but it bugs the crap out of me that crime fiction is treated like the neddish little brother of literary fiction. There's absolutely nothing wrong with crime fiction, and everything right with it.
Donna

[Brian]

I'm about half done with the new Edric book and much of what Timlin says about it is accurate. But I get the feeling that the book is intentionally slow and methodical, as if Edric has some idea that many crime novels are too fast and sloppy and that he's going to show us what a more realistic version should be. (A failed experiment perhaps but a worthy attempt at whatever it is he's going after is my opinion of the book so far.) I don't think the book is mind-numbing because Edric is a bad crime writer. That said, I know its hardly a ringing endorsement for the book. But its not a bad book and I will read the third installment when it is published.

And maybe not all writers can do serious fiction and genre or crime fiction. But some can. Graham Greene famously had his 'entertainments' I think he called them and then his serious novels. If there is a trend of serious literary fiction writers trying to do crime fiction, I say let's have more of it. Much good crime fiction says more about life than some literary fiction. (Readers of this blog certainly know that.) And if others recognize what a great format crime fiction can be, then we should end up with more good books to read (even if we get some - or many - bad ones along the way).

[Perry Middlemiss]

The same arguments apply to other genres such as science fiction. The current favourite amongst sf types is Margaret Atwood's denial that she ever writes science fiction. "Yes, Margaret, we understand", we all say as we snigger behind our hands. Just because it's sf doesn't mean it's crap, and just because it's literary fiction doesn't mean it isn't.

[Dan Wickett]

The following is from an interview Daniel Woodrell did with me back in late March 2002:

EWN:

Have any specific reviewers changed their tune in regards to your style and writing, or don't you pay that much attention?

Daniel:

I never, ever, read reviews, Dan, as I am too confident and virile to care what they say, yet, strangely, I am capable of quoting verbatim from over a dozen of them. I don't know how that happens. But the key to how I am viewed seems to be based on the fact that my first book was a crime novel- and to some critics that's it, you are forever genre or genre trying to crawl to the brighter lights, or whatever, if you start in genre. The reverse is not true, the assumption being that anybody who can write mainstream stuff about that dicey year in prep school, or how Big Sally and her fried yellow cheeseballs became the heart and soul of Stage Right, Alabama, can surely master the requirements of genre in a long weekend. There are, however, the bleached bones of many a mainstream potentate who underestimated the undertaking lying beside the ol' popular fiction trail, my friend. Having said that, I do not consider my last three novels, or four of the seven, to be truly genre in any way except that my name appears on them.

[Fiona]

When Atwood says "I don't write science fiction", I'm not at all sure she's trying to distance herself from the sf genre in that way. Because she actually doesn't write science fiction - she herself coined the term (I think), and it is actually very accurate, when she said "It's more scientific speculation". Which is exactly what it is. After I read The Handmaid's Tale, I was rather shocked that some people considered it science fiction, actually.

[Karen Palmer]

The post by Dan Wickett made me laugh. Good crime fiction is like nothing else, visceral and cerebral in equal measure, and literary writers should think long and hard before attemtping to toss one off. I'm surely not a "mainstream potentate" (see Dan above), but I have had the extremely odd experience of having written a crime novel while being unaware that that's what it was. (I know, I know.) Both my books were published by Soho Press, who has a strong Crime list, and while the first was "straight" fiction, and received as such, the second was harder to categorize. For the five years it took to compose, I thought I was writing about adoption, and identity, ethnic loyalty, and the Calif/Mexico Border, with it's no-man's-land lawlessness. The publisher more or less agreed. So for the hardback, they went ahead and put it in with their regular stuff. But then the few reviews that did appear tended to treat it as a mystery/thriller. So the paperback was switched over to Soho Crime. None of this confusion was good for sales. As you might imagine.

I have nothing but respect for the genre and this site has turned me on to some incredible writers. The discussions are pretty damn good, as well ...

[Dan Wickett]

Very interesting term Fiona, no matter who coined the term. Thinking about it, you're right, The Handmaid's Tale seems to fit S.S. and not S.F. so much.

[Perry Middlemiss]

Over on the "New Scientist" site I found an interview with Atwood (conducted after the release of ORYX AND CRAKE) which contains the following Q/A:
"What do you make of science fiction?"

"A lot of science fiction is fantasy. It's people flying around on dragons, other worlds of strange life forms. Some of them are quite well thought through, they know what the strange creatures eat, they know that life could be sustainable. Others are just having fun.

"Oryx and Crake is not science fiction. It is fact within fiction. Science fiction is when you have rockets and chemicals. Speculative fiction is when you have all the materials to actually do it. We've taken a path that is already visible to us. In 1984 and Brave New World, you could see all the elements that were farther down that particular path. I don't like science fiction except for the science fiction of the 1930s, the bug-eyed monster genre in full bloom."

Excuse me while I stop coughing. There have been countless attempts over the years to define sf, and to delineate fantasy as a part or separate from it, and not many of them have been successful or generally accepted. However, I can pretty much state that the bulk of people within the science fiction community would not agree with Atwood's initial statement. Nor many of the others for that matter. It's easy to point at the bug-eyed monster phase of sf as being representative and dismiss it accordingly, but that's like saying crime fiction (had to get back to it at some time) is represented by Mickey Spillane - no disrespect intended - and all the interesting new stuff is "forensic speculation" or somesuch. It doesn't wash.

It's been some time since I read A HANDMAID'S TALE, but I always considered it to be political novel. I don't seem to remember much "scientific speculation" in it at all. I place A HANDMAID'S TALE in the same sf subset as Le Guin's LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and THE DISPOSSESSED, Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD and Orwell's 1984. Not a bad little group to be part of.

[Fiona]

In truth, it's actually Oryx and Crake which is better described as "scientific speculation" - THE HANDMAID'S TALE is definitely more of a political novel. Certainly, it doesn't correlate with any of my own ideas of what s.f. is - it could, potentially, but only if you deal with it only a very semantic level, if the term science fiction includes "social/political science". Besides, it's already been categorised perfectly well (as you say, along with 1984 etc) as a dystopia.