The Novel in Full
The three finalists for crime fiction novel of the year are Mo Hayder, Ken Bruen, and Michael Connelly. The Wellington Leg Book Circle has all but wrapped its work in crime fiction and is moving on to literary fiction, although The Devil of Nanking may win the literary prize as well. “It’s happened before,” said a source who did not wish to be named, although we all know that AJC Howard secretly does want to be cited. “Denise Mina won both for Garnethill.”
As I read The Devil of Nanking I kept thinking about Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and, to some extent, Denise Mina’s work as well. This does violate my rule about comparing one author to another; it defies logic as The Great Fire was the ultimate literary work. However, if we put these categories aside, The Devil of Nanking has beautiful prose, a complex protagonist and draws much of its power from her state of mind. In lesser hands Grey would be a young woman so clotted with guilt and obsession that we’d turn away from her, somewhat like Maureen in Garnethill. But Hayder blends history, setting, and psychology so well that the story becomes more compelling and satisfying as it goes along.
Let’s rebel against genre strictures. Ken Bruen’s The Magdalen Martyrs and Micheal Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer share the qualities of a good story told in a strong voice, paced in ways that fit the style and structure and atmosphere they’ve created. All the finalists tell stories with beginnings, middles, and endings, all of them create characters worth worrying about, characters who deal with adversity, danger, the consequences of their choices. Isn’t that literature?