From here to obscurity

Although the current debate about the Litblog Co-Op seems to center around whether Kate Atkinson’s CASE HISTORIES is “too well-known” a novel to be picked, it’s important to remember that books go in and out of style so quickly that books — even award winning ones — can be easily forgotten.

It’s something DJ Taylor’s had a good think about recently, too:

As a devotee of faintly

obscure early 20th-century novelists I printed out the email that

arrived the other morning with more than usual relish. A two-day

conference at the University of Warwick to celebrate the centenary of

Henry Green, author of Living (1929), Loving (1945) and other abstruse

works rife with stylised dialogue – and would one care to contribute?

Literary invitations rarely come more enticing than this, and within

moments some crisp suggestions about Green, his chums Anthony Powell

and Evelyn Waugh, were tearing back through cyberspace.

Gratifying
as it is to see Green getting his due – he died in Knightsbridge
retirement in 1973, having more or less drunk his way into extinction –
a faint tocsin of doubt still clanged in my ear. Why Henry Green? Why
not Patrick Hamilton, another lost figure from the inter-war years
whose Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky was recently turned into a
BBC4 three-parter? Why not James Hanley, Walter Greenwood, or FM Mayor?
What instinct or accumulation of influences had propelled Hamilton’s
sponsor, Simon Curtis, to dramatise a work by a man whose most recent
biography was described as the worst-selling book in the history of
Faber & Faber?

And he even goes further, describing a recent incident in one of his classes:

I once spent a couple of

sessions at a creative writing course reading my students a short story

by a 19th-century Norfolk farmer’s wife named Mary Mann. They were,

without exception, astonished by its brilliance. Who was Mary Mann,

they wondered. And why hadn’t they heard of her? I wish I could have

told them.

Now granted, Taylor’s speaking of literature for the most part, but if it weren’t true for crime fiction, I wouldn’t be doing this occasional feature.