David Thayer

Fade to Blonde is the award winning novel from Max Alan Collins. Published by Hard Case Crime, the format and cover art harken back to an era when places like Los Angeles were feeling their post war oats, not quite cities yet, with everything up for grabs. Imagine orange groves instead of tract houses. Hollywood had reinvented indentured servitude with the studio system while greater minds plotted vast schemes to control the destiny of the City of Angels. If you enjoy this sort of thing, Fade to Blonde is a fun read.

Crime fiction is enjoying a renaissance at a time when literary fiction is slipping to the margins. Noir is the heart of the genre and fifty years ago it carved out a little niche as literature for the masses. Even readers of Fitzgerald and Faulkner saw the grimy beauty of Hammett, the swift incarnation of the loner, the wiseguy. Noir delivered morality plays without the pomp and circumstance of academic interpretation; here’s looking at you, kid.

The gulf between literary and genre fiction is widening. Where there was synergy there is now only difference in theme, use of language, subject matter. Genre fiction is expanding while literary fiction contracts, the latter suffering from the idea that story doesn’t matter, theme is obscure, and language is a dialect of the elite.

When the Litblog Co-op chose Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories as their spring choice, there was quite a bit of discussion about where the novel fit along the genre divide. The LBC consists of twenty people who care about books, but it was easy to see their own confusion about the novel. Is Atkinson a literary novelist dabbling in crime? Did the book elevate a genre piece to the level of literature? No one was less certain than the author. She seemed baffled by the LBC’s attentions. Being British, she’s a culture removed from the American literary scene, perhaps more at ease with paradox, certainly not predisposed to worrying about marketing niches. I wrote a book, she seemed to be saying, let’s leave it at that.

But we can’t leave it at that. Booksellers won’t know how to sell it. Readers won’t know what they’re buying. Unclassified books wander the unmonitored halls, creating distress and uproar. Only the marketing department stands between us and anarchy bringing a whiff of the scientific method to the process. Kate, if the cover art features a bloody knife, you’re hardboiled. A martini glass? Tip it on its side and you’re romantic suspense. Suffuse it all in pastel shades and you’ve got literature. That’s better, isn’t it? It’s all so simple.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 9:32 am and is filed under Crime Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.