What makes a crime novel a crime novel? The continued genre vs. literary debate

The New York Times has a glowing review of Dennis Lehane's latest, The Given Day, which takes place in the early 20th century, during the historic Boston police strike.



Now, I want to preface this post by explaining that I'm a huge Lehane fan. Specifically, I love his Kenzie/Gennaro detective novels, which kicked off his writing career. His later work, especially Mystic River, was still of high quality, but to me lacked the same verve and energy of his first six novels. But my beef isn't with Lehane -- he's probably written a great book. I plan on reading it and expect to like it. He's one of my favorite contemporary authors. My issue is with this bit from the review:

No more thinking of Mr. Lehane as an author of detective novels that make good movies (“Gone, Baby, Gone”) and tell devastatingly bleak Boston stories (“Mystic River”). He has written a majestic, fiery epic that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre.

Shades of Doctorow and Dreiser surround Mr. Lehane’s choice of 1919 as the time for this expansive story. It is not simply the relatively unexplored eventfulness of that year that makes “The Given Day” so far reaching; it’s the relentless fierce-terrible nature of the turmoil on parade.

Now, just what irks me about this review? I can't say it fully struck me until I read David Montomery's post over at Crime Fiction Dossier, so I'll let him speak up first:

One line leapt out of me from the review and stuck with me: "He has written a majestic, fiery epic that moves him far beyond the confines of the crime genre."

I've been thinking about that statement since I read it, wondering exactly what the confines of the crime genre are. And near as I can come up with, a crime novel has to have a crime (either past or future) play an important part in the plot, or else it somehow has to deal with crime or the aftermath of crime in a significant way. Other than that, I think anything is fair game.

As I indicated, I haven't read The Given Day. But judging by the description and the reviews I've read, the book involves the lives of police officers, a terrorist attack, spying, bomb-throwing anarchists, suspense, corruption, anti-union violence...Well, damn, that sounds a lot like a crime novel to me.

It's almost like Ms. Maslin (and I wouldn't be surprised if other critics wrote something similar) is embarrased to admit that she really liked and admired a book of significant literary achievement -- that just happened to be a crime novel.

We saw some of this reaction earlier this year with Richard Price's superb Lush Life, another novel of literary prowess that, oh yeah, was a crime novel.

I haven't read The Given Day, either. I don't know if it's any good, or about any of the specific plot points in the book. But, I do know that there is some level of crime in the book. Doesn't that make it, to some degree, a crime novel? Why is this, and not, say, Mystic River or Coronado or Darkness, Take My Hand, a "literary" work, and therefore better than Lehane's earlier work? More importantly, why should there even be that distinction? Why can't a book just be good, whether it's a crime novel or not?

I'd argue that Lehane is finally stepping into a world that has already been populated by the previously mentioned Richard Price and, more importantly, George Pelecanos, whose last few novels have only peripherally dealt with a crime but instead spent more time painting a picture for the reader of a city or society in decay. Are Pelecanos' works less "literary" because they're still set in the modern day and involve drug deals and stick-ups as a way of showing how our world is melting down? If he'd set his books in the 1800s, would he gain more literary praise? My guess is probably. And that, to me, is really annoying. And, to push the joke a bit, more criminal.



Just because a work of prose, or a screenplay, involves a crime or deals with crime shouldn't lessen the literary or artistic value. The idea that suddenly, Lehane, who has been writing solid novels since he first got published, is a more important author because he's no longer writing a straight-up detective piece is silly, and insulting to those of us that spend time reading crime fiction not just because we find the genre interesting, but because the books in the genre we choose to read are, well, pretty damn good.

I didn't fully intend for this post to become a rant against the literary vs. genre bias -- I brought that up already. But, here we are. What do you think about the literary hierarchy? Does it hold water?

Literary vs. 'genre' writing: What's what?

It's been an ongoing debate for, well, um, forever: is 'literary' fiction by default more important than genre fiction, like sci-fi, thrillers/mysteries/crime novels or fantasy? Some, like TIME Magazine columnist Lev Grossman say nay, and point to the recent forays of some big-name authors into more stylized genre fiction (Michael Chabon's recent work comes to mind) as a sign that fiction is fiction is fiction, and 'literary' fiction shouldn't hover above the other genres just because.

Last week, The New School in NYC held a panel discussion to talak it out. The panel, sponsored by the National Book Critic's Circle titled "Merging Genres." The panelists included: Peter Straub, prolific multiple Bram Stoker award winning author and editor of Poe’s Children: The New Horror, just out from Doubleday, and of the Library of America’s H.P. Lovecraft: Tales, was the moderator. The panelists were Lev Grossman, book editor at Time magazine; Geoffrey O’Brien, poet, editor in chief of Library of America, and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books; Robert Polito, editor of the Library of America editions, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, and director of the Graduate Writing Program at the New School.

Sci-fi and fantasy publisher Tor has a nice summary of the panel, excerpted below:

Theresa DeLucci—only a month back to Tor after Clarion West in Seattle—and I went to listen. Straub, who is a passionate supporter of genre merging, and has done some himself in his works, was an enthusiastic and articulate moderator, and happy in the end to be a genre writer. Each of them read provocative and often enlightening opening statements on genres and literature, from widely differing approaches. The panelists, while agreeing that real literary writers were working with genre materials today, and that some exceptional genre writers were even real literary writers, separated two to one—Polito and O’Brien versus Grossman—on the proposition that this was anything new and different, and that any substantial number of genre texts or genre writers were deserving of serious attention. Grossman attempted to present the Modernist separation between high art and the rest, especially genre, as an important barrier to the acceptance of genre, now in the process of being dismantled, while the others argued passionately that James Joyce was perhaps the archetypal mixer of genres, and that it was incorrect to say that Modernism did not in some way encompass genre and merge genres.

Sci-Fi/entertainment blog io9 share their thoughts on the panel as well:

Does the literary establishment still look down on science fiction through its glossy monocle? Apparently so, judging from a panel that took place at New York City's New School over the weekend. Time Magazine's Lev Grossman argued for tearing down the artificial distinction between "high art" and genre writing, and claimed that the recent trend of literary authors using speculative ideas in their work meant it was time to start taking speculative fiction more seriously. But New York Review Of Books contributor Geoffrey O'Brien and the New School's Robert Polito argued that literary authors have always mixed up genres, going back to James Joyce, and they at least implied that genre fiction is only worthwhile as a source of material for literary authors to mine. Oh well.

What's your take? I think there's always gonna be some kind of hierarchy in fiction, as in movies and any kind of creative field -- it's just human nature. Should we be more respectful of more "genre" work? Sure. If it's good, it's good, no matter in what context the work was created. I can point to dozens of crime novels or sci-fi books that read better and are more engaging and overall more fulfilling than a more "literary" or "artistic" work. It's all about what you get out of it. A worthy debate that I don't foresee being resolved soon.