Straddling the line between literary and genre

Jennifer Jordan points me to a recent interview given by Michael Collins about his new novel LOST SOULS (and why I have to spring for the US edition because it’s 60 pages longer!) living and working in America as an Irish expat and what effect this has on his novels, and how he views crime fiction in general:

The later novels turn on mysteries. How important is a watertight plot and the discipline of the detective novel?

In Lost Souls I tried to have some discipline, but I tried to make The Resurrectionists more free-form. Frank’s psychosis was the driving force behind it. I really got rapped on the knuckles in America, where they said they weren’t going to take any more books off me. Keepers of Truth didn’t have an ending and they complained about that originally. That’s why it wasn’t picked up. They said: “you can’t do that; it breaks the law of mysteries”. Eventually they did publish it but they warned me it didn’t go with conventions.

To a lot of people The Resurrectionists was an abortion of a thing: it was too complicated, people couldn’t follow the plot, it was too convoluted and it was a bit too much in Frank’s head. The American publishers were on the verge of not publishing it in America. In fact I changed publisher, to Viking/Penguin in America, but I decided I’d better write something that was pretty much airtight. So in the case of Lost Souls, I sat down and decided to adhere to convention. On the back of the American edition now I’ve got quotes from Michael Connelly and people touting it as a really good mystery. I always get in trouble when I go to different places.

I’ve got a sort of a vested interest in the detective or the mystery genre as such but I find that with things that are not plot-oriented, there’s a big chance that they’re just not going to get published and eventually you’re pushed out of it because you don’t sell enough. So it’s really a matter of trying to wed different ideas you want to put into a book with a genre that will potentially sell enough books. None of the writers ever talk about that. It’s not all about money but you need some money to survive and you don’t want to find yourself at forty, blacklisted by publishers who say: “yeah, decent writer but we’re not taking his book, we’re not publishing it”.

The mystery is a safe genre. I think that you can still say a lot and do a lot with it and you’re just tipping your hat to the publishers and the general reading public who want story. It’s a question of compromise. That brings up the issue of forensics. I’m doing a lot of things to try and make sure I don’t have to get into all of that in the new novel. When you start getting into mysteries being solved through forensics you have to spend an awful lot of time investigating procedural things and my heart is not in that shit. The psychological make-up of Frank in The Resurrectionists, Bill in Keepers of Truth and even Lawrence in Lost Souls – that’s where my heart lies. If you set a murder mystery in 2000, people are going to say “well, it couldn’t happen like that because they have this test or that genetic marker” and you’d be stuck with chapters upon chapters of factual information.

Much as I love Collins as a writer–especially those three recent books–I get the feeling he’s kind of missing the point here. Yes, there has to be some lip-service given over to forensics and procedure, but consider how many crime novels, and excellent ones at that, manage to skim over it entirely and I don’t even notice. In fact, I’d say the best of crime fiction comes a hell of a lot closer to what Collins is actually trying to achieve with his work than what he thinks it’s all about.

I also wonder if perhaps he’d have a different viewpoint if he spent more time with crime writers and actually read such books much more widely, but this is pure conjecture on my part.