Cancel the Mission

One of the most enduring clichés about crime fiction and certainly one of the most cherished by the community is that the genre has a mission you know – « showing the world as it really is », « plumbing the depths of human psyche » and « denouncing the evils of our society ». So entrenched it is that virtually no one denies it except the odd proud « entertainer » who has nothing to lose anyway since they’ll never be taken seriously or considered for awards. Having already denied the meaning of posterity and the importance of characterization, I have nothing much left to lose myself, so here we go: I don’t think crime fiction has any « mission » other than that writers may want to give it.

I have often pointed out in the past that crime fiction, alike most genre fare but to an even higher degree, has become home to the discontents of contemporary « literary » fiction – people who still adhere to the nineteenth-century realistic/psychological novel and object to the mainstream turning its back on it. Those people not surprisingly also long for the time when novels took a stand on issues of the day. That’s why so much current crime fiction – at least the kind that wins awards – is much more politicized than used to be in the past. I’ve lost the count of how many crime novels published today that have « something to say » about capitalism, inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia et alia.

Other than my long firmly-held notion that art and politics mix like food and feces, my problem with this trend is that this commitment to realism and social comment is actually narrowing the scope of the genre rather than broadening it. There are at least two good reasons why « literary fiction » abandoned realism and outright political commitment long ago. First of them is that there are many other ways to get political than writing tracts in the guise of fiction; the other is that strict realism doesn’t allow much in the way of experimention, which is also the point of writing fiction. Proof is that crime fiction has evolved very little formally and stylistically in the past fifty years – only the setting and greater graphicness separate today’s « serious » crime writers from their colleagues from the Sixties. I dissed Joyce in my previous post, but where is the Joyce of crime fiction? Only James Ellroy would come close to qualify, which is saying how low the bar is. There was much more experimentation going back in the Golden Age, ironically at a time when no one cared or craved for literary respectability.

Of course that conservatism has some good aspects, especially from an economic standpoint. The fact that you’re sure of not ending with a book you can’t make sense of is one of the reasons why crime fiction is so popular. It also prevents wild experimentation for its own sake that makes so much « literary » fiction unreadable. But it also entails that more « progressive » yet accessible writers with other priorities (believe it or not, there are a myriad of quite worthy and interesting themes that the genre doesn’t care to address) will stay away – and that the genre won’t grow up.

And yet it has to if it is to survive as a vital form of fiction. One of the reasons why I read and review so little contemporary crime fiction is that I’m tired and bored to read over and over again the same books written in the same way about the same stories, characters and themes. We’re often said that now is the real Golden Age but it is only so if one thinks that Dreiser and/or Forster are the last word on fiction writing. For those of us aware of something called modernity or simply looking for something new it is very frustrating – and we can expect no change for as long as crime fiction is required, alone of all genres, to « show the world as it really is ».