Okay, I'm not too proud to cop to being a dedicated genre
reader. And I don't think my experience is appreciably
different from that of the
"average genre reader," even if I do have a few initials
after my name. Private eye novels are my default reading. I
find great comfort in the conventions. I don't particularly
want to be challenged.
I will sooner read even a mediocre PI novel than a good book
in another genre. Sometimes it takes a conscious effort just
to expand that to other types of crime fiction, even as close
as hardboiled and/or noir.
And as much as I do still enjoy and get immersed in, as much
as I get out of and am glad I have read "serious fiction," it
sometimes requires an "appointment" for me to get
started.
That said, I am interested in that which pushes the edges of
those conventions (one reason I think so much of James
Sallis, for instance). In my mind, the best genre fiction
offers a dialectic between convention and novelty.
Which quote do I find insulting to readers of crime fiction?
Actually, it's the same one you quote:
"Fans of crime thrillers would have complained that "American
Tabloid" was [nearly as] impenetrable [as "Ulysses" -- that
is, if fans of crime thrillers had known what "Ulysses"
is."]
Forget the Ulysses comparison (drop out everything in the
brackets) and you are still left with the claim that crime
fiction readers found Tabloid impenetrable. Where is the
evidence of this? It was a bestseller. Is it farfetched to
believe that many of the buyers, particularly the early
buyers, were fans from his earlier books?
And it found a big enough audience that 6,000 was assured an
even larger press run. How has it been selling? Can't it be
assumed that a certain number (probably a large number) of
those sales are from readers of Tabloid, many of them crime
fiction readers? Would any of them move on to the second in
the series if they could not penetrate the first?
Mark
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