The Pleasure Principle

“IF I HAD A SERIOUS brain injury I might well write a children’s book,” Martin Amis who died last week, infamously said in 2011 in a BBC programme. His rationale: “The idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable…I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.” This rationale often underpins the attitude of many literary fiction writers towards genre fiction, like crime fiction, romance, fantasy etc.

“A guilty pleasure,” that’s what WH Auden said of his fond­ness for murder mysteries, akin to an addiction to tobacco or alcohol. Some like Booker Prize winner John Banville go further and actually write murder mysteries under a different name, Benjamin Black. At the 2009 Harrogate Crime Writing festival, Banville was asked to describe the difference between his literary novels and the crime fiction ones. He said, for the literary ones, he sweats out hundred honed and polished words a day, whereas while writing his crime fiction, he belts out a couple of thousand words a day. Why, though? Why assume that a reader of murder mysteries doesn’t care about good prose, character, specificity and tone? Much as I have enjoyed reading Amis and Banville, they are wrong on this point.

Let’s take children’s fiction. As one children’s writer point­ed out, “children are astute observers of tone—they loathe adults who patronise them with a passion.” This sentiment was prefigured by the great CS Lewis of the The Chronicles of Narnia, in a talk entitled: ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’. The bad way of writing was to write in a manner of “giving the public what it wants.” That’s what literary fiction writers allude to when they say all genre fiction writers pander to public tastes. But there are two other ways, good ways, Lewis says. One, which Lewis Carroll and JRR Tolkien used, was to write for a particular child. In their cases, Alice in Wonderland was for little Alice Liddell, and The Hobbit was for Tolkien’s children. Lewis’ own preference is the second good way: “Where the children’s story is simply the right form for what the author has to say, then of course readers who want to hear that, will read the story or re-read it, at any age… I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.”

Lewis’ way is precisely what allows any fiction, whether literary or genre, to reach the summit of great fiction. Here, I would class in the canon of literary crime fiction, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series and her stand-alone books, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, SA Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, sections of Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs.

Some literary fiction authors say the central concerns of the two are different. One author says the moral journey in literary fiction is everything. Not the preservation of the body (as they claim is crime fiction’s concern), but the preservation of the soul. Well, literary crime fiction includes Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which focuses on the main character’s struggle to preserve his soul. Others like literary agent Donald Maas say the difference pertains to a distinction between the building blocks of narration: scenes, summary and postcards. Scenes hustle us from point A to point B (as in murder myster­ies), postcards sink us deeper into point A (literary fiction). This distinction, I think, is a good one, but doesn’t work for literary crime that manages to simultaneously hustle us and sink us into the dilemmas.

The term—literary crime fiction— needs some unpack­ing. My favourites include Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. In an article in Crime Reads on this subject, writer and historian Tess Little says: “Literary crime at its essence: literary fiction which plays with crime, which explores it and exploits it to other ends; writing which dances at the edge of the genre, twirls and flips the tropes.” Ambiguity rests at its heart. Not a whodunnit or whydunnit but simply “why”. Postmodern mysteries like Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, John Fowles’ The Magus, Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy fall in this cat­egory. Murakami in an interview says he adores Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald who write hard­boiled mysteries, and also Dostoevsky and Kafka (who can be claimed by literary crime fiction). But for him, it wasn’t the whodunnit part of their work but the metaphysical mystery, life’s impossible search for meaning, that was so seductive.

Ironically, authors of some great works of literary crime fiction have themselves seen those works as “entertainments” (Graham Greene’s term for his thrillers, which went onto become such film classics like The Third Man and Brighton Rock). Umberto Eco wrote The Name of the Rose—monks being poisoned in a 14th-century Italian monastery at the height of the Inquisition—in response to an Italian publisher’s request for short thrillers. “Borges meets Conan Doyle,” said a glowing review of the page-turner that combines philosophical reflec­tions with literary game-playing within the tropes of a crime fiction procedural. Yet, when asked about it, Eco said in an interview to The Guardian: “Sometimes I say I hate The Name of the Rose because the following books maybe were better. But it happens to many writers. Gabriel García Márquez can write 50 books, but he will be remembered always for Cien Años de Soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude].” For Eco, it is perhaps not simply “entertainment,” but certainly not in the high league assigned to it by his readers (including me).

Eco in Confessions of a Young Novelist said constraints are fundamental to every artistic endeavour. In order to enable a story to proceed, a writer must impose constraints: a painter who opts to use oils or watercolours, a poet who chooses rhyming couplets, a composer who picks a given key. Constraints cut down the number of options for you and make it easier for you to proceed. Why not then see any genre fiction such as crime fiction as giving the writer a set of constraints, making it easier for her to proceed with the story.

Though purists may disagree, perhaps we ought not to have these categories anymore. The boundaries are fluid these days. Perhaps we should only talk about well-written sto­ries. These writers write about attitudes, situ­ations and choices that move them deeply. Questions of identity, friendship, belonging, hierarchies, love: all steep into their work. They may even begin with the question: “What moral do I need?”, not “What do mod­ern crime fiction readers want or need?” As Lewis says, perhaps it is better not to ask the question at all. “Let the pictures tell you their own moral. For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life.”

Readers too fall in different categories— some read only non-fiction, or only historical novels or only general fiction, while others (including me) read widely. Sometimes we don’t want to work hard to understand a story—we long for pure entertainment. Other times, we long for a fulfilling read­ing experience where you don’t want the book to end. Literary crime can be a glorious marriage—the tropes of crime with the literary sabotage of readerly expectations. Recent addi­tions include The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, and The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz.

You can have it all—the whodunnit, the whydunnit, and the metaphysical mystery— rolled up into a delectable concoction of story, plot, prose and character. All you need is an open mind…you add new things…and abstain from these artificial hierarchies. You can enjoy Fyodor Dostoevsky and Agatha Christie. All pure pleasure.

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