Literary Fiction or Genre Fiction: A Case for Both
“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.” —Stephen King
Booksellers, critics, and a certain type of reader can often be overheard debating whether a particular novel should be considered literature or genre fiction, the latter consisting of a range of popular categories including romance, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, historical, and horror. Stroll through any large bookstore and you’ll find aisles focused on each genre.
For retailers and publishers, these designations make a certain kind of sense, but for the rest of us, it’s an academic exercise at best. Or, to put it into more literary terms: It’s complete bullshit.
That’s because all literature is genre fiction.
A case could be made by simply reciting the most famous stories of all time, from Homer to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wilde, Chaucer, Brontë, Steinbeck, Orwell, Twain, and Tolkien, then placing each classic in a corresponding box of horror, mystery, fantasy, or romance.
That’s easy, even if your English Lit professor rejects the argument. So let’s raise the bar and make another bookish boast.
If all literature is genre fiction, then all great literature is crime fiction.
You might think as a writer of mysteries that I’m hopelessly biased, but let’s examine the evidence before we render a verdict. Crime fiction consists of sub-genres such as mystery, suspense, legal thrillers, spy novels, and police procedurals. Something got stolen, someone was killed, lies are exchanged, betrayals are discovered, loyalties are tested, and it’s up to each reader to find his or her own moral compass before the story ends.
So how big a tent is crime fiction? Let’s round up a few literary classics and see if they’re likely suspects.
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To Kill A Mockingbird is obviously a legal thriller, as much a crime novel as Presumed Innocent or The Firm, the courtroom a brilliant lens for exploring themes of racism and the difference between justice and the law. The Great Gatsby tears the veil of hypocrisy from upper crust society with a murder-suicide that occurs with a tragic sense of inevitability. The story is a long con, peppered with domestic suspense, manslaughter, and murder.
Gothic horror always involves some sort of skullduggery, even when tackling big existential questions. The monster in Frankenstein is made flesh via theft—the wrong brain, stolen body parts—and the story’s pivotal moment occurs when the monster murders his creator, Doctor Frankenstein.
From Julius Caesar to Macbeth, Shakespeare kills more people than Hannibal Lecter. And by the time you finish Aeschylus or any of the Greek tragedies there are dead bodies all over the place.
Even Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett would describe Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as hardboiled. Russian novels are as moody and morbid as any noir fiction, with villains and victims galore.
Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men is a layup—Lenny kills a mouse, a puppy, and Curley’s wife. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn encounter grave robbers, murderers, and thieves. Charles Dickens exposes the injustice of the class system by employing a colorful cast of pickpockets, murderers, crooked lawyers, and greedy landlords, as larcenous a lineup as you’ll find in any contemporary crime novel.
Cads and ne’er-do-wells can be found throughout the pages of Chaucer, Proust, Joyce, Maugham, and Oscar Wilde. The amount of deceit, abuse, and malicious manipulation in Jane Eyre hits every note of a psychological thriller, not to mention bigamy and many other misdemeanors, and we can all agree that Mr. Brocklehurst is a complete jackass who belongs behind bars.
Mythological tales are a fantastic catalogue of seductions, murders, and con jobs, all perpetrated by titans, gods, and nymphs who are tricksters, fraudsters, or jealous lovers. As for fantasy, strip the magic from Le Morte D’Arthur or any epic adventure and you’ll find a criminal endeavor at the heart of every struggle.
Gandalf refers to Bilbo as a burglar when explaining why the dwarves should bring him on their quest to break into the Lonely Mountain and steal the Arkenstone. The Hobbit is basically a heist with wizards and dragons instead of cops and robbers.
But wait, what about Pride and Prejudice or Gone with The Wind, or any heartbreaking love story written since Shakespeare elevated romance to the upper echelons of our literary world? Rather than recall the terrible tragedies that confound star-crossed lovers, consider that every romance involves one character stealing another’s affection or breaking someone’s heart. Sounds like grand larceny with a secondary charge of vandalism—and if those aren’t crimes of passion, what qualifies?
I rest my case.
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A skeptic may claim our examples were originally written as genre fiction but only became classics years later, but I’d say therein lies the hypocrisy of today’s literary world.
The tension in any novel, whether a locked-room mystery or multi-generational literary masterpiece, is driven by a plot in which a protagonist struggles to overcome a series of obstacles. It’s uncertainty about the ending that keeps us turning the pages, and that matters because we’re classifying great literature as any work of fiction that stands the test of time. The attic of history is cluttered with literary novels published with great fanfare, beautifully written but devoid of purpose beyond the act of putting pretty prose on a page. When our civilization crashes and we’re back to sharing epic tales in the oral tradition of Homer, nobody will remember a damn thing about books without a story.
All great fiction is an exercise in empathy, and stories that matter ask the same big question: What will ordinary people do when confronted with extraordinary circumstances? That is the essence of crime fiction, and, when you think about it, all fiction.
So rather than spend your days debating the literary merits of the last novel you read, I’d recommend simply getting lost in a good book. We all have our own hero’s journey, and life is a series of impossible choices we must make if we want to keep moving forward, and our time on earth—like the number of pages in a novel—is always limited.
To waste it would be a crime.