Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: my new blog entry on genre fiction

[JPS]

Red Room | Where the Writers Are

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by JPS

Red Room | Where the Writers Are

"The fact that Tom Rob Smith’s well-written and compelling Child 44 is on the Man Booker Prize longlist says much about how seriously at least one genre is being taken."

Well-written? Please do chime in.

But thrillers have been on the list before. Brian Moore's Lies Of Silence and The Colour Of Blood made it in the late eighties, early nineties. So I suppose they are being taken seriously. It may just be that publishers haven't dared submit thrillers to the prize before out of feeling there was no point. The longlisting, if anything, should spur more genre publishers to give it a bash next year. Sturgeon's Law will then do its work.

[JPS]

I thought it was compellingly-written (not over-written as so many first novels are), and his handling of the research was done with much more subtlety than one might expect.

My problem was with how the plot resolved itself. I sensed the hand of an editor dealing with a slightly messier conclusion and asking for it to be neatened up in a reader-friendly way. To some degree it spoiled the book for me, but until then I found the writing to be well above-average for a genre book such as this.

I'd read the Brian Moore (Lies of Silence) when it first came out (I'd read all of his books by then), and I wouldn't necessarily call it a thriller per se, but a literary novel using certain suspense elements.

My opinion, only, of course.

I can't comment on the writing of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as I'd only read it in translation.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by JPS

I thought it was compellingly-written (not over-written as so many first novels are), and his handling of the research was done with much more subtlety than one might expect.

I suppose since I don't read many crime thrillers I'm in no place to comment on them in that context. Do they really tell everything without a bit of breathing room between writer and reader? That's what annoyed me. In my head I've always liked someone standing there with their arms crossed and tapping their feet without the author adding "He was annoyed", or some such.

Viewpoint was the other bugbear: that it would jump sometimes from paragraph to paragraph. There' was even one occasion, where the two characters who hadn't met, that went something like this:

Mr A walked along the path. He saw a man sitting up ahead on a log. Mr B got up off the log and looked back along the path. He had been waiting for this moment.

My problem was with how the plot resolved itself. I sensed the hand of an editor dealing with a slightly messier conclusion and asking for it to be neatened up in a reader-friendly way.

It was terrible, yes. I don't doubt it would work better as a movie, which was the original intention anyway.

[JPS]

Stewart, I see your point, but I should also say that genre fiction--like screenplays, even by the most gifted screenwriter--has to be weighed on a different set of scales. Pace, beat, revelation and reversal are very key to any work in a genre. We really can't judge a novel by Ian Rankin in the same way we would a work of fiction by Sebald or Javier Marías.

(The book is being adapted by Richard Price, by the way, another literary novelist who very successfully and skillfully turned to genre; some of his work can be seen in the TV series "The Wire" as well as in, for instance, his novel Clockers. He's good, and he'll do a great job on the script.)

I'm deeply grounded in the classics of literature, have two degrees in it, and have been writing and publishing fiction for thirty years. But I can also appreciate the novels of Raymond Chandler and the works of Jean-Patrick Manchette and Eric Ambler and John Le Carré, because what they do within their genres is intelligent and often incisive and, yes, sometimes beautifully written.

I don't think one goes to a crime novel or a thriller for the kinds of subtlety we find in Proust (though Proust did recognize that there's more true emotion in the cheap song sung in a smoky cabaret than the aria sung in the opera house--he understood what can be done with what some people might consider the "lower arts", and disdained the price-taggery of high-mindedness), and if we want the obvious, well, we can read Dostoevsky, whose novels are full of outrageous tropes and cheap emotions, as great as they are. But one thing I've learned as a writer is to respect as well as play with the limits and structures of genre.

Yes, I wrote a spy novel, but it's also something more, a study in the nature of creation, and how creation can sometimes overwhelm reality. But my book can be read in a number of different ways.

And, really, isn't A la Recherche du temps perdu something of a detective novel, the tale of a man seeking something that has been lost? And doesn't he, in the end, find it in the most unexpected way?

Just another kind of detective novel, right?

[JPS]

J.P. Smith | Red Room Writer Profile | Red Room