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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
If you've spent a couple of years being unable to get past the opening chapter of one of the later novels of Henry James, it's hard to resist the idea that there might be a more easily enjoyable version of literature: a crime novel, for example. After all, quite a few literary masterpieces spend much of their turgid wordage being almost as contrived as any crime novel you've ever raced through. On page 13 of my edition of "The Wings of the Dove," Kate Croy is waiting for her father to appear: "He had not at present come down from his room, which she knew to be above the one they were in." But of course she knew that, knew it so well that she wouldn't have to think about it; she is thinking about it only so that she can tell us. If a narrative is going to be as clumsy as that, can't it have some guns?
It's been a long time since Sherlock Holmes cracked his first case, and by now every country in the world must have at least one fictional detective with half a dozen novels to his name. Some countries seem to have a dozen detectives with twenty or thirty novels each. We long for these sleuths to be surrounded by classy prose, like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, so that we can get the art thrill and the thriller thrill at once. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean. Great idea, great sound, great sociological significance. But above all an eventful narrative to make you read on. Something unputdownable, to make you feel better about dreaming of ways to enliven the unpickupable: "Kate Croy looked at the fully dressed but headless corpse hanging from the ceiling fan and realized with a surge of fear that, unless there was another equally well tailored man with the same cufflinks, this was her father."
If the author does that kind of stuff well enough, he starts counting as literature. In the European languages, there were many famous fictional crime fighters after the demise of Sherlock Holmes, but it was Georges Simenon, Maigret's prolific inventor, who really gave the modern crime novel its aspirations to seriousness. Helping to fuel the aspiration, but hindering its fulfillment, is the familiarity provided by a recurrent detective hero. There had always been a space-warp area in which gifted writers wrote noir books that hovered trembling between thrills and thoughtfulness, but without a star detective the gifted writers had trouble writing enough of them, and one of the imperatives of the genre-fiction business is that you must publish enough books to survive in a...
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