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.