“Categories are like walls,” says bestselling author Michael Connelly, “and walls keep people out.” What separates the genre of crime fiction from literary fiction may be more membrane than wall, but it's still a barrier that is often tricky to penetrate. The very act of categorizing brings with it an implicit ranking and the idea that anything shelved under “genre” is somehow lacking.
John Banville, the Booker Prize—winning author who also writes crime fiction under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, reignited this longstanding debate at last summer's Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. When he writes under his own name, Banville told the audience, he manages to put 100 hard-fought words down on paper each day; writing as Black, he manages several thousand. In his post on the Guardian UK's Books Blog, Stuart Evers summed it up well: “the intimation was quite clear, Black's sentences simply weren't as important.” Evers goes on to say that “at its best, crime writing offers unique insights into society, psychology, and human behavior. It can be both engaging and literate; compelling and well-written. It can be innovative and surprising, but what it can't be, it seems, is feted in the same way as literary fiction. The most a crime writer can hope for is to be told, as Ian Rankin indeed was, that their novels 'almost transcend the genre.' Faint praise indeed.”
But do these categories—crime fiction, mystery, suspense, whodunit—actually come into play when an author is staring at a blank computer screen, about to start a new novel? Or is categorization, as Dennis Lehane claims, “a marketing issue, not a writing issue”? Kate Atkinson—whose series featuring U.K. detective Jackson Brodie usually falls under the umbrella of crime fiction while her early work, such as 1995 Whitbread winner Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is classified as fiction—says, “When I sit down to write, I simply feel as if I'm writing a book. It doesn't mean I'm unaware of the tenets and structures of 'the crime novel,' and the plotting certainly feels a lot more complex, but really I'm still writing character-led novels.”
Characters, especially those of the recurring variety, are often as vital to a crime novel as the crime itself. There's a reason readers often refer to an author's body of work by the name of his or her character, from Connelly's Harry Bosch books and Lehane's Kenzie and Genaro to Scottish writer Denise Mina's Paddy Meehan series. It's shorthand for the bond readers of crime fiction feel with the creations of their favorite authors, be they LAPD detectives, Boston PIs or Glaswegian newspaper reporters. “In an ideal world,” Mina says, “literary fiction would come down to our level of connection and stop being taken so seriously that readers who don't enjoy something feel wronged instead of wrong.”
A perfect example of an author who refuses to be hemmed in by categorization is Jess Walter, who's picked up an Edgar Award (for Citizen Vince) and a National Book Award nomination (for The Zero), and whose latest novel, The Financial Lives of Poets, is a meditation on the financial crisis seen through the eyes of a failed poet and financial reporter. Walter likens his feelings at the beginning of his fiction career (his first two novels featured Spokane police detective Caroline Mabry and were categorized by his publisher as mysteries) to those of a child of divorce. “It was like literary fiction was the mother,” says Walter, “everyone respects her, she gets the admiration and the prizes, while pop fiction was the father. He's driving the sports car, making all the money, but people don't respect him. I was thinking that everyone was like me and would want these two sides back together again. Doesn't everyone want both: pace and story as well as thematic depth, great sentences, and inventiveness?” Now, says Walter, he tries not to let those “phony divisions” enter his mind.
Walter also takes issue with what he describes as “market pressure to write the same book over and over—whether it's crime or literary,” comparing it to a painter being told to paint only landscapes. Like Walter, there are myriad writers who slip in and out of the genre label. Laura Lippman, whose series features Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan, says that she doesn't consider Richard Price, for example, a crime writer “although he writes a lot about cops and criminals” (particularly in 2008's Lush Life) but that both Atkinson and Lehane weave in and out of the genre depending on the book. Lehane cites Lippman herself as someone who “started as a writer of paperback originals that were clever and fun. She could have stayed there and made nice coin, but she went someplace else and began producing this fearless body of work that nipped at the marrow of our culture.”
Yet despite this evolving and deepening that Lehane admires in Lippman's work, one of the enduring arguments against crime fiction in general and detective stories in particular is the rigidness of their structure. Edmund Wilson, the celebrated critic and longtime New Yorker contributor, wrote in 1944 of his attempt to understand the appeal of so-called “detective fiction,” which he saw as only tired copies of Sherlock Holmes, a sleuth he claimed he outgrew at age 12. This structure—the all-knowing detective versus a city full of suspects who are cleverly whittled down until the culprit is revealed—is no different, argues author Louise Penny, than other forms of literature with rules. Penny, whose series features Chief Insp. Armande Gamache solving crimes in the small Quebec village of Three Pines, points out that “many literary forms have structure, and surely the challenge is to both work within it and transcend it.” Citing the haiku form, Penny wonders, “Would anyone suggest one day the haiku masters might be good enough to write a longer poem?”
Ways in which crime writers tackle the crime, its perpetrators, and its victims are limitless, despite the authors falling under the broad heading of crime fiction. “For the record,” Lippman says, “I am a genre writer, proudly so, but I think the genre has a lot of elasticity. I may be limited, but the form isn't.” John Hart, whose latest novel, The Last Child, dealt with the unsolved disappearance of a young girl, says that he likes to “explore characters whose lives have come off the rails, and the ripple effect of some horrible deed (usually murder) is the best means to strip those people down.” For Tana French, whose novels Into the Woods and The Likeness focus on crime in and around Dublin, “the higher the stakes within the plot, the more the characters have to lay themselves on the line, and the more room you have as a writer to explore the full range of human emotion and experience—and the stakes don't get much higher than life and death and truth, which are what lie at the heart of detective novels.” Sometimes the crime itself, even murder, is simply a building block in telling a particular story. For example, Cara Black, whose Parisian series features private detective Aimée Leduc, says, “The murder, while important and propels the plot, isn't the focus; it's how the murder impacts those surrounding the victim, the community, and this little part of Paris.”
But what of readers who dismiss crime fiction in its entirety, shrugging off anything that's labeled genre? Karin Slaughter, the author of two series featuring a smalltown Georgia coroner and a pair of Atlanta detectives, says that when she's confronted by people who claim to not read mysteries, she gives examples of popular novels where crime plays an integral role. “I always ask these folks if they've read The Lovely Bones (about a child who is raped and killed by a pedophile) or Water for Elephants (which opens with a fairly violent murder) or To Kill a Mockingbird (about an alleged rape) or The Great Gatsby (where someone is murdered).”
In her forthcoming book, Talking About Detective Fiction, legendary crime novelist P.D. James points out that even classics like Jane Austen's Emma have more in common with detective fiction than one may think. According to James, in Emma, “The secret which is the mainspring of the action is the unrecognized relationships between the limited number of characters,” and the story is “confined to a closed society in a rural setting, which was to become common in detective fiction.”
In addition to the perceived stigma of the genre label, it is often implied that crime writers work in that particular genre in order to either make money or bide their time until their big literary break. But Michael Connelly “writes what I like to read,” and says he became hooked on crime fiction at an early age, especially the work of Raymond Chandler. Both Karin Slaughter and Alafair Burke cite real-life crimes in their childhood hometowns (the Atlanta child murders and the BTK killer in Wichita, Kans., respectively) as one of the reasons they turned to crime fiction. For Cornelia Read, whose third book featuring Madeline Dare is coming in March from Grand Central, “crime novels are where the keenest social and moral observation is happening these days in fiction—much the same way that Tina Fey and Bill Maher and Jon Stewart are the truest American heirs of H.L. Mencken and Edward R. Murrow right now.”
In the end, what matters to writers and readers of crime fiction—and fiction in general—is the quality of the writing, the depth of the characters, the intricacies of the plot, and the richness of the setting. “A great voice is a great voice,” says Sarah Weinman, who writes the crime fiction-centric “Dark Passages” column for the Los Angeles Times as well as the popular blog “Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.” “Why deprive oneself of such a voice just because it no longer stays within the lines of outright genre form? The fun in following a writer—especially a great one—is never knowing where he or she will go.” It's the power of the voice that makes readers flock to writers who may have retired their series characters and shifted to stand-alones (think Ian Rankin) or traded the modern-day mean streets of Boston for the same city's police strike in 1919 (think Dennis Lehane) or left one mystery unsolved and weaved in another without missing a beat (think Tana French). “When you're working to make a sentence as perfect as it can be,” says French, “or to make a character real and vivid and three-dimensional, how and whether you do that isn't dependent on where the book will be shelved.”
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| Jordan Foster is a freelance writer in Portland, Ore. |
