Tim Heald, and the USA...

Danny and I had opened a gap ahead of the rest of the group. John Masters, our leader, was not a well man - had indeed only a few months to live - and his marching pace was somewhere between a
lope and a shuffle. He wore an old U.S. cavalry cap with crossed Gurkha kukris and had a complexion of well-worn wallet. At the head of the canyon in a crepuscular dawn we began with a ritual slug of tequila then trailed down towards Bandelier. Every half hour the main party stopped for a brief pause and Masters pecked at nuts and raisins from an old tobacco tin.

Like me, Danny fretted at the stops and liked to skip over the stepping stones which speckled the stream. He was a native New Mexican and had lived in Santa Fe all his life. He was at home in the forest. To me the scratchmarks on the bark of that tree were just scratchmarks. To him they said she-bear and cubs.

'I hear you're a novelist?'

Diffidence is one of the curses of a public school education ('We don't like swanking here, Heald'), but my reply was bascd on more than the ingrained habit of self-deprecation. 

'No, not really. . . whodunnits . . . mysteries. . . I write detective stories.'

Danny stopped and turned. He seemed both perplexed and cross.

'But you've published full-length books? Fiction?'

'Yes.'

'Then you're a novelist.'

Danny painted and wrote magazine articles. He was 'artist and writer'. I had written full-length works of fiction. I was 'novelist'. He wasn't paying a compliment, just stating a fact. It would be oversimplifying to say that class and caste conscious Britain is more snobbish about authors than the democratic States but when I lived among them I found Americans not only accorded the author - any author - a higher status than here - but they also tended to feel that a book was a book. The idea of literary 'genres' might - might - be convenient but it wasn't used as a measure of class distinction. Here when fiction is classified it tends to be into 'Fiction' or 'Novels' and a raft of 'Crime', 'Thrillers', 'Sci-Fi', 'Romance', 'Children' and so on. The first category is serious top of the page stuff, the rest is 'genre'. The word is pejorative.

I got a strong sense of this the other night when I chaired a panel of Literary Editors before an audience of Crime Writers at the Groucho Club. I have to tread carefully because at the moment I am Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association and members can get steamed up if their Chairman deviates from the party line. It seemed to me that it was quite an informative and stimulating evening. Other crime writers however were clearly narked by what they saw as the patronising attitude of the Literati and it was impossible not to have some sympathy when the trio of editors all admitted, without any noticeable display of shame, that they didn't read crime novels. The implication was that serious literary folk should not waste their time on pulp.

The view is widely held in the world bounded by the Lasdun concrete of the New Academe and the wire at Wapping. Just occasionally a 'crime writer' is allowed to break genre and canter up to the top of the page or on to the covers of magazines. 'Serious' literary critics then say that they have 'discovered' a writer who 'transcends' the genre. Such critics have not, on the whole read any others from the subterranean world of the genre so the basis for comparison is slight. They are surprised to find that the author writes literate prose and creates characters with a third dimension. They remain sceptical of pace, plot and facility and disturbed by lack of serious purpose. Sometimes such a critic will have a stab at creating one of these last, crediting an entertainer with undreamt aspirations. Perversely however if a 'genre' writer is obviously trying to change gear and move to a different part of the forest, both peers and serious critics will accuse him of being over-ambitious and too big for his boots. It is one thing for a crime writer to write something acceptable as literature provided he does it virtually by mistake. Quite another if he does it on purpose.

As a reviewer I have done time criticising 'genre' and 'non-genre'. As a writer of fiction - oh all right 'novelist' - I have done one 'non-genre' to set alongside the shelf of 'genre'. One is always supposed to be a rotten judge of one's own work but it seemed to me that my non-crime book was very similar in tone and content to the crimes. The main differences were that it had no murders and was reviewed by a different batch of critics - Nyes and Thwaites rather than Berlins and me's.

Reviewing thrillers, as I now do for The Times, I find myself getting jaded in the same way that I did after a longish spell doing 'Fiction' for The Telegraph. I suppose it is possible to argue that the literary stuff sets itself higher standards. If so it makes failure more painful and I read a lot of failures - not always by unknown novelists. There's nothing more tiresome than a literary household word trying to convince us that he's discovered a new art form when he's doing little more than clearing the bottom drawer. The 'genre' people certainly seem to be more aware of the old-fashioned story-telling disciplines although smart critics dismiss these as 'formulae' and 'conventions'. Of course there are worn-out clichés in 'genre' as in 'literary' fiction, but anyone who thinks that crime writing is still in the Agatha Christie/Freeman Wills Croft world of crossword puzzles and railway timetables isn't reading the modern material. And although there are probably more 'genre' than 'literary' writers with really crude ideas about the English language, the best of them write a clear clean prose which would pass muster anywhere.

I don't know enough about the other categories - the children's books, the romances and so on - but must they necessarily be less interesting to the intelligent readers of national newspaper book pages than the sort of book which always commands attention?  Isn't there a case for more cross-fertilisation and more open minds, even if we don't abolish the idea of genre altogether?

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