Huff Post on Crime Fiction: What do you think?

[Matt Rees]

Huffington Post book blogger Jason Pinter has a column about "The State of the Crime Novel." It's a fairly Yankocentric appraisal of current crime writing by a series of top US reviewers. It includes this from veteran mystery columnist Oline H. Cogdill: "One of the main missions of crime novels is to paint a timely portrait of the issues in our times. This doesn't mean these novels have to hit you over the head with a message or make a soapbox with their plots. The more subtle, the better. Crime novels are the social novels of today." I agree with that -- I've certainly tried to have my Palestinian detective novels function as an entertaining way to examine the society of the West Bank and Gaza -- though I don't think it's a necessary condition for a crime novel to be great. It's certainly true that by their nature crime novels are more likely to travel beyond the hallowed halls of the creative writing faculty in their search for material than so-called "literary" fiction. What do you think?

[B.R.Stateham]

On one hand, while I could agree to the idea that a good crime novel is today's social novel, a part of me rebels at this idea. That part keeps asking me 'why are we imposing artificial beliefs on something that was written to entertain?'

Do crime writers set out to write a modern era novel with the intent in mind of changing the world? Do they really want to shine a bright light on a subject that's probably already well illimunated? I don't think so. Some do--of course. You can never say 'never.' But the vast majority just want to write a damn good novel. The labels describing what the novel is/does comes from someone else.

And those labels are usually wrong.

[Matt Rees]

Just in case you didn't notice -- did you check out the Huff Post diss for Crimespace?