Transcend. As in "transcend the [crime fiction] genre." Discussion about genre vs. literary has been around a long time and generated recent commentary from Robert Crais, Michael Dirda, Oline Cogdill and Brian Lindemuth, among others. Here's a very brief pick of my favorite quotations from these sources on the subject:
Robert Crais: "Well, there’s nothing new about the ghettoization of crime fiction or any of the genres. A long time ago, Gore Vidal wrote three mysteries under the name Edgar Box and supposedly just knocked them out. To me, though, it has more to do with marketing than anything else. I guess there is a literary establishment, a self-selected group of people who have risen to certain positions and, for whatever reason, command a pulpit...
I’ll bet you $10 right now that there are an awful lot of literary writers who started a long time ago and now they find themselves in this place where secretly they feel trapped. And you know what they really read for fun? They read crime fiction. And they start to think, God, wouldn’t it be fun—I mean maybe just fun—to write a big, blowout, kick-your-ass thriller?...
Think of the caveman and cavewoman sitting around thinking, Yesterday, I had a close call with the sabertooth. You don’t want to sit there in the dark night with crackling embers, fire dying, and think, Two o’clock on Wednesday—the tiger’s going to catch me and eat me...Whether you’re talking crime fiction, fantasy, romance, whatever, it’s about story."
Oline Cogdill: "I think being a mystery writer is high praise in itself because it involves so many different aspect of writing. It takes much skill and intelligence to keep readers guessing for more than 300 pages not just about who did it but why it was done. When so called literary writers try to write mysteries, the result is, frankly, often less than desirable.
So elevate the genre, showcase the genre and let us see how rich and deep the genre is. Just don’t transcend it."
Michael Dirda: "Good books, it has always struck me, can be found in every genre. That's the premise behind my most recent collection of essays, Classics for Pleasure. I write there about every sort of classic: Sappho's love poetry and M.R. James's ghost stories, John Webster's dramas and Georgette Heyer's regency romances. These are all works that, in some way, have shaped our imaginations. The overemphasis on genre boundaries really is shortsighted. But I do think things are breaking down now. About 30 years ago, I published a piece in The Nation called 'The Genre Ghetto', and there maintained that the divisions between branches of literature were often artificial and were usually just marketing tools. I sensed that in the coming generation, more and more serious writers would come out of fields like fantasy and crime fiction. These writers would adapt genre tropes and ideas and themes to a so-called mainstream literature."
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