The Literary and the Criminal
Go to any crime writing convention and you’ll find panel after panel organized by subgenre. There are the big subgenres: thrillers v. mysteries. And there are the many particular ones: police procedurals, private detective novels, amateur sleuth stories, traditional mysteries, spy novels, historical mysteries, etc. As writers of genre fiction, we know our place. Whether we write about guns-for-hire whose ambiguous moralities make them hard to distinguish from the murderers they pursue (as in a lot of private detective writing lately) or cats who steal balls of yarn from needlepointing clubs (“cozies”) or first-century physicians who solve killings in the shadows of the Coliseum (Roman Noir), we crime writers also eventually find ourselves discussing the relation between crime fiction and other kinds of writing: romance, Western, sci-fi – and the big one, literary.
Among crime writers, the arguments concerning literary fiction tend to follow two lines of reasoning. We argue that literary fiction is also a genre, with its own conventions, its own subgenres, its own fashions. And we argue that good crime writing is every bit as good as good literary fiction: that it is as well crafted, as psychologically insightful, as stylistically complex, as momentous. I always like to throw in that much of the best literary fiction – from Oedipus Rex and the Oresteia to Hamlet to “The Purloined Letter” and beyond – is also crime fiction.
Our arguments are – at least to my thinking – hard to dispute. What literary writer demonstrates a stronger understanding of the comic metaphor than Raymond Chandler (“She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks”)? What literary writer captures a moody sense of place better than James Lee Burke (“The sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire countryside looked soaked in blood”)?
But as we make our case – mostly to ourselves and our readers, who need no persuading – we sometimes become apologetic and self-justifying, as if we really don’t entirely believe our own words. We’re drunks claiming that we’re proud to be alcoholics.
Some of our self-doubt may come from institutional and cultural histories. In theory, most people no longer believe in high-low distinctions in the arts. Such distinctions, we say, are elitist and, often enough, misogynistic, racist, or some other -ist. Who’s to say that the writer of a sonnet sequence is, by function of her subgenre, a lesser poet than the writer of an epic? Who’s to say that jazz is a lesser form than opera?
But the reality is that, especially in the world of prose writing, many still harbor – and some openly profess – beliefs in genre hierarchies. Norman Mailer might have won the Pulitzer for his true crime The Executioner’s Song, Truman Capote might have collected literary accolades for In Cold Blood, and Joyce Carol Oates might publish crime fiction often and proudly, but Isabel Allende spoke for many others when she said, upon publishing her own attempt at a mystery, “I’m not a fan of mysteries.”
Is there a lot of badly written crime fiction? Yes, cringingly, laughably bad. Is there also a lot of badly written literary fiction? Yes, with as many cringes but fewer laughs.
So how do we resolve the persistent questions about the relative value of genre writing and literary writing? We could do worse than to look for good writing wherever and however we can find it. And if we need to make writer-by-writer or book-by-book comparisons, we might consider, for example, sex scenes, which appear with about equal frequency in genre fiction and literary fiction. Sex is hard to write well. Jeffrey Eugenides is an excellent writer, but “my body, like a cathedral, broke out into ringing”? Really? Thom Wolfe is also hugely talented, but “Slither slither slither slither went the tongue”? In comparison, I much prefer James Cain: “I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church.” That’s brutal, honest, sexy, and very sinful. Even the mixed metaphor works, cramming together two bodies that shouldn’t share the same space. In the context of the rest of the novel, that little passage is a thing of beauty. It articulates a kind of truth. That was enough for John Keats, and when I’m reading either genre fiction or literary fiction, it’s enough for me.
Michael Wiley is the author of six crime novels, including the Shamus Award-winning mystery A Bad Night’s Sleep and, most recently, the thriller Second Skin. He writes occasional journalism and frequent critical articles and book reviews. Michael teaches British literature at the University of North Florida.
