I know what you mean. I run a small, independent,
intellectually upscale-ish
(i.e. our customers tend more towards the pretentious than
the populist) bookstore in NYC myself, and I spend a lot of
time arranging and re-arranging my sections and
classifications. Within genre fiction, I usually stick stuff
that I feel has genuine literary merit in FICTION--e.g.
"Motherless Brooklyn,"
"The Friends of Eddie Coyle," and anything by Chandler,
Hammett, Goodis, McCoy, Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Ross
MacDonald, Jon A. Jackson and Jim Thompson, et al. In
MYSTERY, I stick pretty much everything else, and authors
that I have read and wouldn't care to sample a second
time--anything that even remotely smacks of "airport
fiction", David Baldacci, Jeffrey Archer, William Bernhardt,
Sara Paretsky, and scores of other anonymous, largely
interchangeble mass-market mystery writers of no particular
interest to me.
I do agonize quite a bit over a lot of authors that I like
(sort of) but remain ambivalent about (e.g. Robert B. Parker)
or authors that--gut feeling--I just think will sell better
out of the mystery (e.g. Lawrence Block) .
I think it's a format thing. If publishers put mysteries out
in trade-paper format, our fiction-section customers will not
feel as if they're buying
"genre fiction." We sell lots (well, for us it's a lot) of
Patricia Carlton books for example, largely, I think, because
Soho Press puts them out in such attractive trade editions;
good graphic design, great covers. And I positively KNOW that
if the very same books were released in cheaper, pulpier mass
market editions (the "less literary" format), that absolutely
none of our fiction-section customers would buy them.
Conversely, our mystery-section customers want their books to
be in small mass-market format; they don't want anything that
looks like it could conceivably have been assigned to them in
college.
David Moran
Marianne Macdonald wrote:
> > are there really no distinctions made between
genre fiction and
> > literary
> > fiction in Europe?
>
> The situation is unclear - as the discussions of
genre here and on
> similar lists probably make clear. There is a
tendency for crime
> writing and sf to be considered as something
"different", but there
> is a lot of confusion.
>
> For example, in the very good local book store and
in my local
> library (both 2 blocks from my home, but I'll try
not to be
> triumphalist) "Fiction" and "Crime" shelves are
separately labelled,
> but there is lots of crime on the fiction shelves.
Yesterday I
> bought MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN from the fiction section,
and THE FRIENDS
> OF EDDIE COYLE from the crime; in the library, I
look in both
> sections if I want a little murder.
>
> Even the more modern university "English"
departments in the UK
> often teach courses in "The Murder Mystery" these
days, or include
> crime writers in other literature courses: a very
far cry from one of
> the worst days in my life, when I attended the usual
oral exam at
> Oxford University for my doctoral thesis only to be
told by the
> chief examiner "If you wish to publish this
dissertation, do give my
> name as a reference; but this is not the sort of
topic for which we
> award Oxford doctorates." (The subject had of course
been formally
> accepted; the problem was that I was writing about
Ezra Pound, who
> was both American and 20th century, and therefore
beyond the pale to
> certain people. Nowadays, of course, you wouldn't
let anybody get
> away with this, but I'm talking a while back, she
quavered.)
>
> Marianne Macdonald
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