The Washed and the Unwashed (Once Again)

Literary fiction, genre fiction. What are the differences?

I fully understand that we've discussed this and argued about it many times, at this blog and elsewhere, but the question is still asked--and I still agree that it's an interesting subject.

And an important subject, to those of us who write and (try to) publish fiction, and especially short fiction. Why? Because even though markets for our work seem to be fading as we speak, those markets that remain are usually looking for either literary stories or genre stories. But not both. So, to avoid wasting our time and the editors' time, we need to know and understand the difference.

"Okay, then," says the beginning writer, or the hopelessly bored dinner companion, "what IS the difference between literary and genre?"

Views and Opinions

Some have said literary fiction is an Oprah's Book Club pick and genre fiction is a "beach read." Others say lit fiction is what you find in The New Yorker and genre fiction is what you find in AHMM, Asimov's, etc. I once read someplace that literary stories are good for you and genre stories just taste good. (I like that one.) My wife says literary stories are what she watches on TV and genre stories are what I watch. One of the most straightforward observations I've heard, although it's wrong, is that genre fiction is mystery, Western, SF, romance, and horror, and that literary fiction is everything else.

I've even heard some rude folks say that literary fiction should be read by those who want to be challenged mentally, and that genre fiction should be read only by the mentally challenged. Others, just as rude and not to be outdone, say that reading too much literary fiction can make you mentally challenged. 

In my short-story writing classes, I used to tell students that so-called literary works deal mainly with relationships, emotions, and "the meaning of life," while genre writing deals mostly with action, excitement, and adventure. I think that's a pretty fair definition.

 

Examples

An extreme example, I think, of a literary story is Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." It's a short piece about a guy who hikes into a pine forest, pitches a tent beside a river, spends the night, and fishes for trout, and that's pretty much it. There's no plot, no conflict, nothing except one character doing a lot of thinking and (hopefully) making the reader think as well, about implied but never-mentioned subjects like war and rehabilitation. There's also symbolism, as he watches the river (like his own life) flow past him. 

The opposite extreme, the ultimate genre story, might be something I remember hearing in elementary school, a story called "The Hook." You've all heard it: (1) A teenaged boy and girl go out parking despite warnings that a deranged killer with a prosthetic hook is on the loose, (2) they think they hear someone sneaking around outside their car while they're romantically involved, (3) they bug out for the dugout, screaming and spraying gravel, (4) they later decide they overreacted and probably really didn't hear anything at all, and (5) when they get to the girl's house and the boy walks around the car to open her door for her, there's a hook hanging from the passenger-side door handle. No deep meanings there, no profound messages, no disillusioned or dying or suicidial characters. The whole story is plot--a twist-ending plot designed to scare the bejesus out of you--and the characters are there only to carry out the storyline. And it works.

Straddling the fence

Sometimes the difference between literary and genre is obvious: The Grapes of Wrath on one end of the field, let's say, and a Rambo movie on the other. But sometimes, as is true of many things in this life, the lines can get a little blurry. 

James Lee Burke's mystery novel Cimarron Rose is considered by some to be both genre fiction and literary fiction, mainly because of his use of beautiful, elegant, descriptive language; crime novels like Mystic River, L.A.  Confidential, and The Silence of the Lambs combine the categories because of the strength and depth of their characters; and classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and Shane are a mix of literary and genre mostly because of the life lessons they teach. Scout Finch and Bobby Starrett both undergo extreme changes in the way they look at life and their fellow man, and many consider this process of "becoming a different person during the course of the story" to be the single most important gauge of whether a piece of fiction belongs on the literary side of the courtroom.

Lucky with critics, unlucky at love

One thing you can count on: the critics will like you if you succeed at writing literary fiction, and the public will like you if you succeed at writing genre fiction. There's a reason that genre fiction is also called "commercial" fiction and "popular" fiction: it sells. Stephen King once said, and I'm paraphrasing, that if you specialize in writing literary fiction there's a good chance you might find yourself sitting down with your family one night to an Alpo-and-noodles casserole.

Does that mean that all of us who actually want to earn something (rather then just learn something) should try to write only genre fiction? Of course not. I think you must write the kind of stories and novels that you most enjoy reading, and feel comfortable writing. If you try to do otherwise . . . well, you'll probably fail.

It's sometimes not even safe to try to write in more than one genre. Some can do it effectively (Nora Roberts/J.D.Robb with her romances and mysteries, Loren Estleman with his mysteries and Westerns, etc,), but it's not easy. I don't know either of those authors, but I would bet the house and farm that both of them enjoy reading the two genres they've chosen to write in. And my hat's really off to those who can successfully write both literary novels and genre novels. There are many, but Larry McMurtry and Ed McBain/Evan Hunter come first to (my) mind. I still find it impressive but hard to believe that the same writer created both Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment.

More Opinions

The often-stated view that literary fiction is character-driven and genre fiction is plot-driven is correct, I think, but it's an oversimplification. To be successful, both categories need engaging plots and interesting characters. But I do agree that in literary fiction the characters are probably more important than whatever it is they're doing, and in genre fiction what they're doing is more important than who they are. As you probably know by now, I love to quote Stephen King, and I often find myself thinking about his observation of literary vs. genre. "Literary fiction," King once said in an interview, "is about extraordinary people doing ordinary things. Genre fiction is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things."

Here's another quote that I wrote down in a notebook long ago--I think it's attributed to Bill Stephens: "The characters in literary fiction spend so much time thinking, they never get around to doing anything. They constantly are confronted with deep issues of: Who am I? Why am I here? What should I do? Where am I going? Why can I not love/be loved? . . . and a myriad of other 'Woe is me' considerations. There just is no time left to do much."

Alas, there is also no time left to do much in this post. Let me say, though, that I am primarily as genre reader and a genre writer. I admit it. I do occasionally read and enjoy literary works, I certainly appreciate the effort and talent that it took to write them (I've actually sold some stories to literary journals), and I understand that many folks prefer to always read and write that kind of fiction. As Seinfeld would say, "There's nothing wrong with that."

But, God help me, I usually prefer to wallow among the unwashed. I simply LOVE stories like Die Hard, Jaws, Psycho, Blazing Saddles, and The Big Lebowski, and I love the goosebumps I get when I think of "The Hook."

I also still remember the childlike excitement I felt a few years ago when I heard about an upcoming movie called Cowboys and Aliens, featuring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. Good grief, I thought--James Bond and Indiana Jones, fighting it out with Predator? How could that not be fun?

How about you? Do you like to write, and read, literary fiction? Genre fiction? Both? If you're a writer, have you been successful in either, or both? I'd love to hear your thoughts on all this, in the comments section.

Over and out.

 

 

Crime Scene Comix Case 2026-07-038, Grin n Bear It

Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.

Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.

 

 

 

 

© www.FutureThought.tv

 

That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.

In Memoriam: Philip Kerr (1956-2018)

(Quick Stolen Truck Update: The police recovered it! The case is still open but I will post more about it once I am able! Today's Post: When Scottish mega-author Philip Kerr died in 2018, I wrote the eulogy below for Kerr-one of my own all-time favorite authors, crime fiction or otherwise. Now that the Bernie Gunther novels are being adapted for broadcast beginning later this year on Apple TV+ with Jack Lowden–River Cartwright in the equally terrific Apple TV+ series SLOW HORSES–attached to play Gunther and Colin Firth (COLIN FIRTH!!!) attached to play Gunther's mentor on the Berlin Homicide Squad in a script adapted from Kerr's final novel, METROPOLIS, completed as he was dying–a prequel and origin story for the main character, set in pre-Nazi Weimar Berlin during the late 1920s. And get this: Peter Straughan (TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY, and CONCLAVE) wrote the script and is showrunning it! In light of all of this great news, and in the interest of continuing to give July a positivity that is an exact counterpoint to the dark days that were June, 2026 [again, stolen truck!], I am reposting my piece celebrating Philip Kerr, in hopes that this might serve as an introduction of sorts for readers who have yet to encounter either the late Mr. Kerr, or his most celebrated creation: Bernie Gunther!)

On Friday, March 23rd, 2018, I got the word from an old friend that a mutual old friend had died. Crime writer and freelance editor Jim Thomsen texted me that Phillip Kerr died of cancer that day, aged just 62.

I suppose that in the strictest sense Mr. Kerr and I were not actually friends. I never met him in person. The closest I got was trying and failing to find him in the green room before the Edgar Awards in 2016, the year he was nominated in the Best Novel category for his book The Lady from Zagreb.

And yet, I do consider him a friend. In much the same way that one girl in the movie Ten Things I Hate About You says of William Shakespeare, "We're in a relationship," I think of Philip Kerr as an unwitting mentor, whose works have both delighted and provoked me.

And more, they made me want to work harder at the craft, to whet the edge of my facility with the written word, to forge characters who breathed and sweated and threatened and quailed and laughed and hated and fairly jumped off the page.

Philip Ballantyne Kerr was, by most accounts, a study in contradictions. Scottish-born, but no lover of Scotland, the child of devout Baptist parents who, by his own admission knew early on in life that "Jesus and I weren't going to get along," and a man who trained as a lawyer, yet despised the notion of practicing law.

An outsider by temperament, Kerr was bullied by other kids in school–and even teachers–in part because of his dark complexion. He later poured these experiences, and the feelings of isolation which attended them, into his fiction.

The result, in part, was Bernie Gunther.

Kerr's most famous creation, Gunther was, like Kerr himself, a study in contradictions: a former kriminalinspektor on the Berlin police department's famed Murder Squad, Gunther was a decorated veteran of World War I who lost his first wife in the flu epidemic which came hard on the heels of that war. A cop whose career thrived during the Weimar Republic, and who resigned from the police soon after the Nazis swept into power in 1933. Kerr once neatly summed Gunther up in a single sentence: "Oscar Wilde with a Walther PPK."

And yet Gunther eventually finds himself coerced into working for the Nazis. The reason they tolerate him (even as they disparage him as a "Jew-loving Bolshevik," among other things) is because they need someone with Gunther's talents. As Kerr has none other than the villainous Reinhard Heydrich put it to Gunther: Nazis are good at cracking skulls and shooting people. Any thug can do that. But when you need a good detective...

It's an effective set-up. But what Philip Kerr wrote was so much more than superb historical crime fiction. Like all great literary stylists, he was able to move fiction into the realm of great art: not so much literature as a brilliant expression of the universality of the human condition. Kerr possessed a knack for helping his readers understand, even sympathize, with people whose experiences seemed on the surface so vastly different from those of the reader.

Kerr proved especially adept at channeling the zeitgeist of early 20th century Germany, painting a portrait of these people (many of them fictional doppelgängers of actual historical figures) which was by turns scathing and sympathetic, unblinking, hard-edged, and in the end, fair. And in his Gunther novels he would return again and again to one of the questions which has haunted the world in the years since Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker: Why did the German people allow Hitler and his gang of thugs to rise unchecked in the first place?

Kerr's narrator Gunther is a brooder, so he is the perfect vessel for this and other existential questions posed to and about the people and the time. In the prologue to Greeks Bearing Gifts (second to the last of the Gunther books in order written, final one in the series chronologically), Kerr has his protagonist attempt–not for the first time–to answer this question:

But how is one ever to explain what happened? It was a question I used to see in the eyes of some of the American guests at the Grand Hotel in Cap Ferrat where, until recently, I was a concierge, when they realized I was German: How was it possible that your people could murder so many others? Well, it's like this: When you walk through a big fish market you appreciate just how alien and various life can be; it's hard to imagine how some of the fantastic, sinister, slipper-looking creatures you see laid out on the slab could even exist, and sometimes when I contemplate my fellow man, I have much the same feeling.

Myself, I'm a bit like an oyster. Years ago–in January 1933, to be exact–a piece of grit got into my shell and started to rub me the wrong way. But if there is a pearl inside me I think it's probably a black one. Frankly, I did a few things during the war of which I feel less than proud. This is not unusual. That's what war's about. It makes all of us who take part in it feel like we're criminals and that we've done something bad. Apart from the real criminals, of course; no way has ever been invented to make them feel bad about anything. With one exception, perhaps: the hangman at Landsberg. When he's given the chance, he can provoke a crisis of conscience in almost anyone.

The question haunts Gunther throughout the series, and since Kerr mastered the art of the non-linear plot thread beginning with 2011's Field Gray, he was able to revisit this central theme of his Gunther novels in a variety of inventive ways.

Kerr was a prolific writer by any stretch of the imagination. He wrote other series (including a recent triad of thrillers centered around a soccer team–soccer apparently being his favorite sport), a variety of standalone thrillers, even an acclaimed series of children's books!

I confess I haven't read any of the non-Gunther books yet. Now, unfortunately, it seems I'll have an opportunity to catch up on the rest of this remarkable writer's canon. And I have been looking forward to delving into his series of children's books with my son once he's old enough (they're middle reader books, a la Harry Potter, and my son is five, so I've got some time).

With this entry I have done my best to pay homage to a powerful artist whose work has had a galvanizing effect on my own. As with trying to capture the essence of all wondrous things, the effort strikes me as a bit like trying to describe an eclipse to a blind man: you're doomed to only do justice to one half of the experience.

All that said, my life is the richer for having known Philip Kerr in the context of his fiction. And isn't that really all we can ask of great art?

Thanks, Philip. And may you rest in peace, my friend.

*.    *.    *

See you in two weeks!

Always Be Sure, Please, To Call It Research

This piece might be useful to some people. We shall see.

Recently I have noticed a number of writers talking about doing research for their fiction, especially historical fiction.  Well, I spent 41 years as a librarian helping people with research, so I thought I might offer a few bits of advice.

I'm not going to talk about sources because they change with some speed. And besides, I moderated a panel of librarians at Left Coast Crime this year and you can find some of our recommendations here.  

What I want to talk about is some principles on finding sources.    Here goes.

Principle 1. Wouldn't it be nice to have a highly trained research assistant at your command? Surprise! You do. They work at the public library and they are paid with your tax dollars whether you use them or not.  You can call, text, email, or visit.  Don't be shy.  If you give a reference librarian a question they can spend a couple of hours digging into you are making their day.

And here is a subclause that is probably out of date but worth mentioning: If you ask a librarian for research help be as specific as possible.  I think the use of search engines has probably made this problem less common, but when I started out a lot of people seemed to think they weren't permitted to ask for what they really wanted, so we had conversations like this one I had with a college student in the early eighties:

Q: Where are your books on religion?

A: Most are upstairs under the letter B (Note: We used the Library of Congress system). But are you after anything more specific?

Q: Yes, books on Islam.

A: Great. Any particular book?

Q: The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Well, that shrank suddenly, didn't it? (And by the way, the Autobiography is typically shelved under E for American history.)

Principle 2. A lesson I learned long before the Internet: No matter how obscure your subject is, someone thinks it is the most fascinating topic in the world.  Find that person and you may wind up begging them to stop giving you information.

One way to hunt for that source is to look for websites related to your topic. Can you find a way to contact the person who created it? Yahtzee!

Principle 3. You have probably figured out that not all information is available for free on the Internet. I am especially thinking of scholarly articles. You need to look at databases (a stupid term libraries use (mostly) for digital periodical indexes), but your public library doesn't have all the ones you were hoping for.

Okay, is there a college or university in your area?  You can look at their website and see what databases they have, but, of course, they are only available to their own students. Bummer!

Don't panic.  Contact the librarians there and ask: 1. Is your library building open to the public?  And if it is: 2. If I go there in person can I use your databases? 

The university where I am a professor emeritus lists 47 databases under the subject of History, including:

* American History and Life

* America's Historical Newspapers

* American Prison Newspapers

* Historical Statistics of the United States

And so on.  

Principle 4. What if you learn of the existence of the perfect article but no library you can access has it? You contact your public library but they say no;  getting you a copy would cost them a billion kajillion dollars because of the APAGEP Factor. (Academic Publishers Are Greedy Evil Parasites).

Go back to Principle 2.  The author of that perfect article is the person who finds your subject  so fascinating.  Contact them and they may be delighted to send you a free e-copy of their article.  You  aren't depriving them of anything because they wouldn't get any of that billion kajillion dollars anyway. (See APAGEP above.)

Principle 5. If you are trying to dig beyond the obvious search engine, familiarize yourself with the tools of Boolean logic.  For example, if you go to Google Scholar and search for:

private detectives  nineteenth century chicago boston 

...you will get less-focused results than if you search for: 

"private detectives" "nineteenth century" (chicago OR boston) 

Thus endeth today's lesson.  Best of luck with your research.  I hope you get an A+ or, better yet,  published.

My Current Life in Haiku

 

Productivity

A revered memory from

My younger days, sigh

 

Cozy up

            In Raymond Chandler’s famous essay, The Simple Art of Murder, he eloquently provided the artistic and intellectual foundation of hardboiled crime fiction.  As one of his committed devotees, I lapped it up, and eagerly followed his direction (unwittingly, not having yet read the essay) with my own hardboiled series, trilogies and standalones.

            That notwithstanding, I’ve never believed that embracing one form, or sub-genre, requires rejecting all the others.  I lean more toward the omnivorous, having begun my reading life with my mother’s handoffs of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout and Earl Stanley Gardener.  And all on my own, Arthur Conan Doyle.  Lately I’ve been back at it, with a deeper appreciation for everything that Chandler condemned, realizing that these presumed shortcomings are actually the point.

            You might have noticed there’s no surfeit of cynicism, treachery and immorality on display in our daily newsfeed.  This was equally true in the first half of the 20^th century, probably more so, since they experienced two world wars and economic upheaval we can only imagine.  What most people wanted to do was escape, and these master hands understood just how to provide the ideal transport.  But as I read now, having lived the intervening years in the back alleys and mean streets of Noir fiction, is that there was much more to it than that.

               

                Looked at objectively, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes are exceedingly bizarre individuals.  Even with their loyal sidekicks and benighted enablers, they exist entirely apart from general society. Introverted to the edge of misanthropy, riddled with obsessive compulsions and hints at dark caverns of the subconscious, any would fit nicely into one of Marlowe’s sidetracks.  It isn’t just that they easily read the criminal mind, they empathized, familiar with the moral ambiguities that entangle even the most callow and supercilious.  All three are honorable men, yet none could be called trusting or emotionally available.  All would afford an interesting date, but you wouldn’t want to move in together. 

            Anyone tempted to belittle Agatha Christie should give it a try themselves.  In particular, her prose has a distinct clarity, efficiency and immediacy, required for packing a lot of setting, character development and extravagant plotting into fairly compact spaces.  She never wastes a sentence, much less a full passage, on anything unessential to her story.  I relish Marlowe’s circuitous diversions and introspections, but it would be fair for Christie to say, ”For pity’s sake, young man, get to the point.”

            

            In order to have the description “mystery” appended to any work, it needs to have a puzzle.  It’s no accident that ”Ludwig”,  a new show from Brit Box, features an actual puzzle creator thrust into a career of solving mysteries.  You may seek out Agatha Christie as an unthreatening pastime, but you better be on your mental toes, the plots so thick with clues, both portentous and incidental, that I’m tempted to open a spreadsheet.  Even then, you may not be able to crack the code, since she had only a passing loyalty to the principle of fair play.  Modern mystery critics would find this irredeemable, but I like to point out that no such problem ever occurred to Arthur Conan Doyle.  Sherlock isn’t only a deductive genius, he spends a lot of time offstage performing capers we only learn about in the final pages when the mystery is triumphantly solved for us. 

Speaking of Brit Box, a first-rate mystery needn’t unfold at an English country estate, though for me, the form achieves its most sublime in the presence of Jeff caps, sheep, ancient pubs and a whole population of flinty, emotionally repressed tea drinkers.  I find refreshing the absence of histrionics (who needs grief counselors when you can put on the kettle or have a barman pull a draft), abundance of deadpan humor and rich colors muted under permanently overcast skies.  Along with the nobility of simply carrying on despite it all. 

Changes in the Canadian Criminal Code: About time, I didn't know that wasn’t illegal before and Thank goodness, finally.

This summer the Government of Canada passed legislation touted as one the most consequential reforms of the Criminal Code to reduce intimate partner violence and femicide and, when I dig into them, I suspect that many other women and men are responding with a mix of ‘about time’ ‘I didn't know that wasn’t illegal before’ and ‘thank goodness, finally’.

Below is a graphic from the Department of Justice that shows the changes:

The law newly defines the killing of women and girls as first-degree murder, meaning the homicide is both planned and deliberate with an an automatic life sentence with no possibility of parole for 25 years. Prior to this it could be classified as 2^nd-degree murder; a deliberate killing that occurs without planning and the minimum sentence is life in prison with no parole for 10 years. Big difference.

The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability defines femicide as ‘the killing of all women and girls primarily by, but not exclusively, men.’ This definition helps track trends and also is broad enough to enable national and international comparisons of data.

In 2015, the most recent year for which official data is available, 29% of homicide victims in Canada were female and, while homicide rates are lower for females, "In 2015, close to one half (48%) of all solved homicides involving a female victim were committed by a spouse or other intimate partner. Family members (other than a parent) were perpetrators in 22 percent of female homicides”

This continues with a surprising statistic, “The risk of homicide varies by age. Among females in Canada, homicide rates are highest for girls 11 years of age and younger (40.7 per million population).”

Children.

They are talking about children killed by someone they know. Looking into this further, one in five victims are under eighteen.

So again, children.

One of the other big changes is to make coercive control illegal. What is coercive control? “It can be things like isolating the victim, cutting them off from social contacts, checking their phone, not allowing them to work, not allowing them to be in contact with family and friends. [It] can include physical violence, sexual violence and coercion, but not always. Economic abuse is very common.”

Brenda Ottenbreit a survivor of domestic violence and an advocate for other survivors, who fought for this change, points out, ”You may never have a hand violently put on you before, but 80 to 90 per cent of fatalities … it's not always physical before, but there is always coercive control.”

The last part of the change is making it illegal to share non-consensual sexual images (already illegal) and adds deep fakes to that. This is an important update for a new era of photoshop and AI.

Will these changes in the law actually reduce the murder of women and girls? Making it first degree murder might help, particularly if there are more resources put into finding and prosecuting the murderers. One shameful areas of murdered women is that Canadian Indigenous women are at elevated risk of homicide and many of these murders are not solved, despite the magnitude of the problem:

“[H]omicide rates for Indigenous women and girls were approximately six times higher (48.2 per million population) than rates for non-Indigenous women and girls (8.2 per million population). Other research suggests that Indigenous women are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than any other women in Canada and 16 times more likely than Caucasian women. This over-representation of Indigenous women and girls among homicide victims has been observed across the country, with the highest rates found in the territories and in the provinces of Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, specifically, it has been estimated that Indigenous women and girls are 19 times more likely than Caucasian women to be murdered or missing.

If the elevation to first-degree murder means that more resources will be allocated to finding and prosecuting perpetrators, this is a very welcome change.

Making coercive control illegal is highly promising. First, call me naive but I am surprised that it has been allowed to continue without any legal consequences. Second, I suspect there will be a reduction in suffering of women who can now prosecute these actions as well as hopefully preventing any escalation to murder.

All in all, these changes in the criminal code are hopeful if, and only if, they are coupled with resources for enforcement. Essentially, these changes may help find and prosecute whodunnit when women and children are murdered and may even stop them before they dunnit. 

Here's hoping.