CATEGORICALLY SPEAKING, WRITERS TEND TO BE KNOWN BY THE COMPANY THEY KEEP. BUT YOU NEEDN’T BE LIMITED BY THAT.
September 1988
This past October I flew to Minneapolis to attend Bouchercon, an annual colloquy of mystery fans and authors. Every year one mystery writer is selected as Guest of Honor, a process of wining and dining and all-around lionizing that is enough to turn the head of a marble statue. Last year was my turn in the barrel, and it was pleasant indeed.
Then in January I was one of a great flock of mystery writers who descended upon Key West for a literary symposium on the mystery novel. Like everybody else, I appeared on a couple of panels. One of mine was called “Western Cultural Attitudes as Reflected in the Contemporary American Mystery Novel.” (As you may imagine, this was a topic close to my heart; rarely do I sit down to the old Smith-Corona without asking myself, “Well, old horse, what are you gonna do today to reflect Western cultural attitudes?”)
It’s the end of February now, and I’m in New Mexico, typing these lines. In a week or so Lynne and I fly east to spend a pair of weekends at Mohonk Mountain House, up the Hudson from New York, where we’ll be participating as suspects in one of Donald E. Westlake’s annual mystery weekends. (The guests, divided into teams, try to solve an original mystery by grilling the suspects, who remain in costume and character during this process. Then the teams put on original skits of their own advancing their respective solutions. It is, I assure you, more fun than it sounds.) The play this year is a takeoff on ’40s private eye films, and I play a nightclub bouncer named Wilmer Gunsel, while Lynne is typecast as Helen Hunt, a torch singer. (Westlake’s the private eye, and his name is Phillip Screwdriver, and I wish I’d thought of that.)
After that’s over, or possibly between the two weekends, I’m supposed to participate in some sort of transatlantic conference call with British mystery writer P. D. James and with mystery critic and journalist Marilyn Stasio, who will be writing up our exchange. Then, in May, I really ought to attend the annual Mystery Writers of America get-together in New York, especially since it’s an international meet this year.
At the end of June, if all goes well, I’ll be spending two weeks in Spain and Italy as an American representative of the International Association of Crime Writers. In mid July there’s a writers’ conference in Rochester, New York, focusing on the mystery; I may turn up there, if I can fit it in.
In October Random Walk comes out.
It’s not a mystery.
The point of the foregoing is not to impress you with how well I’m doing or what an exciting life I lead. (Actually, if you live long enough and keep on writing the damn stuff, and if you’re not too offensive to too many people, and if word gets around that you don’t eat your peas with your knife or pass out at inappropriate moments, you get your share of these perks. It helps if somebody somewhere likes what you write, but it isn’t always absolutely necessary.)
Anyway, my motive for boring you with all this is to stress the extent to which I am identified as a writer of mysteries. This is to be expected; the great proportion of my work over the years has been in the field of mystery and suspense. The books, to be sure, have differed considerably from one another, ranging from lighthearted mystery through hardboiled private eye and foreign intrigue to psychological suspense. Still, in the mystery house are many mansions, and most of what I’ve written can find a room therein.
A friend of mine, a woman with a checkered career in film and publishing, most recently settled in as the proprietor of a Greenwich Village shop that sells exotic soap. When an assistant asked her how she’d gotten into the business, she replied in some temper that no one ever set out to become the keeper of a soap emporium, that one did not graduate from college and move to New York with the goal of purveying scented soap to yuppies, that on the contrary it was the sort of thing one found oneself doing when one realized that Other Things Had Not Worked Out.
My own emergence as a mystery writer was not quite so unintentional, but I can’t say that I set out specifically with that goal in mind. As best I recall, I initially wanted to be up there in the pantheon of great American realists, a linear successor to Stephen Crane and Sherwood Anderson and Wolfe and Hemingway and Farrell and Steinbeck and O’Hara. At the same time, I was willing—nay, eager—to write absolutely anything that someone would actually print. I sold my first story to a mystery magazine (although in its initial version the story was by no means a mystery story) and its acceptance had something to do with the direction of my future efforts. I didn’t go on writing mysteries simply because I found some measure of acceptance in the field. I also found that the kinds of stories I wanted to tell lent themselves to the genre. And, after enough years of this, I turned around one day and discovered that I was a mystery writer.
What does it mean to be a practitioner of a particular genre of fiction?
For one thing, it means that certain people who otherwise wouldn’t read your books will, and that others who might otherwise read them with pleasure will carefully avoid them. There is a reason why bookstores and libraries put all the mysteries in one place, all the westerns in another, all the science fiction in a third. Many readers are categorically inclined; while they will occasionally pick up a plump bestseller, or a work of capital-L Literature, the bulk of their recreational reading will be confined to one or two categories. One person will read almost any science fiction novel, unless it is by an author he has learned to detest, but would never bring home a western no matter whose name is on the cover. Another will read anything but science fiction.
“I have to confess I’m not familiar with your work,” I’ve heard more than a few times, “because I never read mysteries.” The admission always strikes me as curious. I can no more imagine a reader who would dislike all mysteries than I can envision one who would like everything published in the field.
Not long ago I was talking with someone who had recently discovered Elmore Leonard, and who had read his way through all of Leonard’s contemporary novels and couldn’t wait for the next one. Had he read any of Leonard’s westerns? He had not, and shook his head at the suggestion that he try them. “I don’t read westerns,” he said.
My Uncle Hi is a very different sort of reader. When he finds a writer whose work he enjoys, he reads everything the person has written. It doesn’t matter what category a book is in; what matters to him is the style and sensibility of its author. “I read authors,” he says.
For my part, I can’t imagine how anyone could enjoy Dutch Leonard’s contemporary suspense novels and fail to enjoy his westerns. The only difference between the books is their setting. Leonard always writes the same sort of book, a story of more or less ordinary human beings caught up in a more or less desperate set of circumstances. Whether a particular story is set in Detroit in the 1980s or Arizona a century earlier seems a relatively unimportant distinction. If you like the one, you’ll like the other.
Same goes for other writers who labor in more than one vineyard. Loren Estleman, another Detroiter, writes westerns when he’s not chronicling private eye Amos Walker. Bill Pronzini, best known as a mystery writer, has written some fine westerns that are not unlike his mysteries in structure and style. Brian Garfield began as a writer of westerns and has moved into the suspense field. Isaac Asimov is equally at home in science fiction and mystery, and has written some books that fit both genres at once.
If you like any of these writers in one genre, you’ll like him in another. Unless, of course, you look at the label instead of the cloth, and make your judgment in advance. (That’s what prejudice is, of course. Pre-judging.)
And all of us do this to some extent, in some area or other. Not long ago, dial-hopping on the radio, I picked up a station and found myself enjoying the record that was playing. Then I realized it was Punk Rock, and I remembered that I hate Punk Rock, and I stopped enjoying the record. I know that’s ridiculous, but it’s no more ridiculous than ruling out westerns or mysteries or science fiction or romance or historical novels or whatever you’re convinced you don’t like. I think it’s legitimate to say that, all things being equal, I’m more likely to enjoy one genre of fiction than another. But all things aren’t equal, not when you get down to individual cases, and if I let myself rule out certain books categorically I’m as much handicapped by my prejudices as if I operate that way in the field of interpersonal relationships.
Another prejudice relates to category fiction as a whole. Many readers, including some who read category fiction as well as many who don’t, take it for granted that mysteries and westerns and science fiction novels and so on are automatically less consequential than mainstream uncategorized fiction. The genre novel is presumed to be of less substance, to have little purpose beyond escape and entertainment, and to be a far cry from Art or Literature.
At the same time, some of the people who read and/or write in a category, will argue that mysteries (or westerns, or whatever) are intrinsically superior to mainstream writing, that they are more honest and less pretentious, that they have more right to be taken seriously than do those books and writers that take themselves so seriously.
I think either position is fundamentally silly. According to the first point of view, there is no such thing as great category fiction because, once a book is great, it stands outside of its category. Hamlet is a detective story, Les Misérables and Crime and Punishment are crime fiction, but because these works are Literature they are no longer considered mysteries.
(The publishing world operated under a similar Catch-22 until recently. A mystery, it was generally acknowledged, was a book that sold between 4,000 and 6,000 hardcover copies irrespective of who wrote it or how well it had been written. Whenever a mystery writer sold 15,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 copies, he or she ceased to be a mystery writer and became instead a brand name. Conversations like this ensued: “We’re not going to bother advertising your book because we sell 4,000—6,000 copies of a mystery whether we promote it or not.” “What about Agatha Christie?” “Oh, that’s Agatha Christie.” “What about Ross Macdonald?” “Oh, that’s Ross Macdonald.” “Well, what about me? What am I, chopped liver?”)
I suppose it is legitimate to say that most category fiction is of less consequence than most mainstream fiction, if only because a book can be published in any of the genres that has no purpose beyond escape and entertainment. Once this was true of mainstream fiction, but now, with the near-disappearance of the midlist book, a mainstream novel has to be more than a pleasant little read to get itself published. It must have either a strong topical hook or genuine bestseller potential or at least the illusion of true artistic merit. It is still enough that a genre book be entertaining, and thus some of them are not much more than that.
These are all thoughts that may be of some value in helping you decide in what area to concentrate your own efforts—to whatever extent these are choices we get to make. Over the years, it seems to me, I’ve pretty much written the books I wanted to write, or was given to write. I’m sure some of my books turned out the way they did because I had come to think of myself as a mystery writer, but I can’t recall ever taking a story that I’d have preferred to write without a mystery-suspense element and forcing such an element into it.
I wonder now, with Random Walk soon to be published, whether its reception will be adversely affected by the general perception of its author as a mystery writer. As far as a segment of the reading and reviewing public is concerned, to be sure, a writer of category fiction is not to be taken seriously, even when he steps outside of his category. This may not seem fair, but whoever said life was fair? I know several writers who’ve used pen names on noncategory books, not out of lack of pride in them but to avoid being the victims of just the sort of prejudice we’ve been talking about.
I never seriously considered doing this. It’s my book, and the last thing I want to do is hide the fact. Besides, I want the people who’ve liked my other books to have a chance to see if they like this one. I’m hoping a lot of them are like my Uncle Hi, who reads writers, not categories.