Does crime fiction have lousy characters?

In her New York Times review of Benjamin Black's Christine Falls, author Kathryn Harrison writes:

Mainstream literary novels succeed or fail on the strength of characterization, but noir fiction is less concerned with building complex and believable characters than with creating a medium in which murder and mayhem can thrive. Place is essential to noir, character less so.

That strikes me as nonsense, as the last thing I'm interested in reading is any kind of book (literary, crime, science fiction, picture book) that has weak, undeveloped characters.

If a novel has a great sense of place, or a cool plot, but it has flat, uninspired characters, that's not a very good book. It doesn't matter if it's "genre" or "literary" (whatever those terms actually mean).

I've been seeing a lot of this genre bashing going on lately (and posted about it a week or two ago). Just yesterday, I moderated a panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book that had 5 thriller writers on it. (Barry Eisler, MJ Rose, Lisa Unger, Matthew Jones, Robert Walker)

During the Q&A session, a guy in the audience looked at the panel with what I can only describe as aghast incomprehension and remarked "Listening to you 5 authors talk about the importance of creating characters, it sounds like you're literary writers. But you're supposed to be genre authors!" (I'm paraphrasing -- I think it was even more insulting than that.)

Perhaps the so-called literary folks are feeling the heat. Could it be that the massive sales of crime fiction novels are starting to get to them?

The more I think about it, the more I believe that these snobbish attitudes have more to do with fear and jealousy than anything else.

Comments

[De Scribe]

I agree with you, David. I can't imagine good fiction (crime or otherwise) without clear characters. Especially in crime fiction, quite a few authors get very strongly associated with their protagonists, and this can't happen if the protagonist is not characterized well.
Moreover, one of the key challenges in crime fiction is to establish motive - and motive cannot be strong if characterization is not.

[Michael Berry]

I sometimes believe that what these people mean is that characters in genre fiction ACT, while characters in literary fiction THINK. It never occurs to them that character can be revealed through action, rather than through endless bouts of self-analysis.

[Tim Maleeny]

The notion that character isn't essential in crime fiction is utter horseshit. The characters and the moral dilemmas they face are what draw people to crime fiction in the first place and, most importantly, what brings them back. Ask any avid reader of crime fiction to describe the plot of their favorite book and they'll probably have a hard time. Ask them to name their favorite characters and they can't stop talking. Series characters dominate the bestseller list --- just ask Lee Child, Barry Eisler, Janet Evanovich or Laura Lippman if people don't believe Reacher, Rain, Stephanie or Tess are well-drawn characters.

[Chris Grabenstein]

Thanks for speaking up for "us." I think we all start with character first but then we "genre writers" put ours into stories and test them under fire...which, come to think of it, is how character is so often revealed.

[I.J.Parker]

Massive sales? Maybe there's my problem. Too much characterization.

[Bill Cameron]

Aye, nonsense. The best genre fiction, I believe, features rich, complex, interesting characters.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say the attitudes of the literary adherents can be attributed to fear and jealousy though. I see is as more a kind of intellectual elitism that blinds them to what's really going on in a lot of genre fiction. They makes assumptions and rather than test them, proclaim them as axiomatic. Too bad for them. They're missing out on a lot of good reading.

[Jan Burke]

Poor Kathryn Harrison. I'm always taken aback when someone demonstrates this degree of ignorance in private conversation. She's openly published a proclamation of her lack of acquaintance with the genre in the first few sentences of a NYT review. Sadder yet, she probably thought she was looking down her nose while she was doing it.

[Mike Maranhas]

David,

You wrote:

"During the Q&A session, a guy in the audience looked at the panel with what I can only describe as aghast incomprehension and remarked "Listening to you 5 authors talk about the importance of creating characters, it sounds like you're literary writers. But you're supposed to be genre authors!" (I'm paraphrasing -- I think it was even more insulting than that.)"

For the record, I was that guy and you completely misinterpreted my expression as well as my inquiry. What I said was "I have a question about the delineation of genres. Had I not known this was a panel for Mystery and Thriller writers, I would have thought you were all Literary Fiction writers. My reason for saying so is that all you're talking about is the psychological development of your characters. If that's the case, how did you get classified as Mystery and Thriller writers? What's the difference between a thriller and mainstream fiction?"

My reason for posing the question is that I, like MJ Rose who answered it, have been rejected by the traditional NYC publishers because they couldn't place me. My novel, Re'enev, contains mystery, action, and suspense within the dynamics of a complex romantic relationship. Since I didn't fit any genre nicely, I was listed as Literary/Mainstream Fiction. I have never been able to understand the reasons some authors are placed in their genres. Others, like Steven King, are obvious. But the members on that panel were not. I didn't see the difference between what they wrote versus a Literary Fiction writer who writes a suspenseful novel, or one with a mystery, or one involving a romantic relationship. Why is Atlas Shrugged considered Literary Fiction when the plot is essentially a mystery? What prevented Cold Mountain from being classified as a romance? Or Pride and Prejudice for that matter?

I was not insulting these people in the least. I actually was complimenting them for I couldn't see the difference between their writing and general fiction, and I'm aware of the stigma associated with genre writing. I wanted to hear them define this difference. If you remember, they could not. Matt Jones said he had never intended to write thrillers. He just creates a character and lets the character tell the story. MJ Rose grabbed the mike with passion and said she had recently written an article about this very topic. She then explained what I mentioned above: that she hadn't written for any genre and, as a result, couldn't get her first novel published by a traditional house. So she self-published, sold a few copies, caught New York's attention, and sold out. It was the publisher, she said, who placed her in the thriller category which, she surmised, was a marketing decision. I took this to mean that the publisher determined where her novel would sell best. Barry Eisler seemed to agree with me.

I understand you were busy moderating this discussion, thinking about the following question and such, and therefore couldn't devote your full attention to each inquiry. But your lack of focus and subsequent description of the incident really put me in a bad light. I know you didn't mention my name in your blog, but MJ and Barry Eisler, who were on that panel, know who I am. They know I asked that question. I just emailed each of them yesterday. I would never denigrate anyone's work for the genre in which it appears; I'm not that superficial. In fact, I find the whole genre issue crass, albeit necessary for commercial purposes. I was simply trying to elicit the logic used in publishing to categorize writers, from some successful writers whose categorization I couldn’t easily justify.

I didn't see this post until this morning. I wish I had seen it earlier, so I could have defended myself in a more timely manner. I now know what it feels like to be misquoted.

[David J. Montgomery]

I apologize, Mike, for misunderstanding your question, and for mischaracterizing it here on the blog. I reported it to the best of my recollection (and deliberately did not attempt to identify you by name), but it seems clear that I blew it.

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