“The best crime fiction today is actually talking to us about the same things big literary novels are talking about. They are talking about moral questions, taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary situations, and saying to the reader, ‘How would you cope in this situation?’ Or saying, ‘How would you feel about living in a world in which this these crimes are allowed to happen?’”
Author Ian Rankin discusses the “divide” between crime fiction and literature. (via Author Scoop)
2 responses
You only have to look at someone like Stieg Larsson to see somebody who everybody is reading, whether they are professors or whether they work in factories. It’s a phenomenon.
I’d love to see David Shields translate his manifesto into a crime novel, to both destroy the genre while elevating it to the level of literature, while the unknowing masses consume it on trains, utterly clueless. Kind of like Bansky tagging a building; Shields tagging a genre from the inside out.
Genre classifications in general are super interesting/weird.
Richard Lange’s short story collection Dead Boys is another example of a hyper-literary + philosophical + artistic piece made up of stories largely originally published in crime/mystery journals.
For that matter lots of books by “sci-fi/fantasy genre” author Gene Wolfe are also considered literary/art masterpieces by critics of each genre, including writers for places like NYT, New Yorker, etc.
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