Jeff Vorzmimer wrote:
> I'd be interested in Charles' take on it.
I thought the piece was very good, not least of all in that
it put books we care about in front of an audience of some
five million people who might not otherwise have known they
exist. And while some of those people might conclude that
these books are campy or only worthy of parody, some of them
might be intrigued enough to pick one up and read it, and
might discover what everyone on this list already knows,
namely that at their best these books are memorable, moving,
honest, painful, frightening, insightful, shattering works of
fiction.
When we set out to create Hard Case Crime, we specifically
decided to avoid anything kitschy, or campy, or parodic --
these books mean a lot to us, and we wanted to do them
straight. A number of the publishers we met with expressed an
interest in the line but only if we turned it into a sort of
Austin Powers spoof of crime fiction, something like what
Dean Martin did to Matt Helm. And we had no interest in doing
that.
That said, when you analyze the piece CBS ran, you have to
keep in mind what the "Sunday Morning" program is: It's not a
place for searing, socially conscious documentary or intense
literary analysis; it's a news and entertainment program
whose goal is to wake people up on Sunday morning with a
combination of stories that (other than the hard news at the
top of the hour) are generally gentle and charming and
amusing and often nostalgic. When they report on a man who
has spent the past thirty years traveling to every part of
the United States, they focus on the charming, quirky,
quixotic aspect of his project; they don't talk so much about
the many lonely nights on the road or the poverty of many of
the spots he must pass through or what dark personal history
might underlie the man's compulsive wanderlust. When they do
a story on the 100th anniversary of pizza, it's a charming,
funny look at a favorite snack; they don't focus on why
workingmen with just a few nickels in their pocket and a 15-
minute break in which to eat gravitated toward this cheap and
portable meal in the years after WWII when it became popular.
And when they report on hardboiled crime fiction, if they
poke some mild, wry fun at the genre's excesses, or add some
gunshots and a honkytonky piano to the soundtrack to add a
bit of life to what would otherwise just be a series of
static shots of book covers? That's fine with me. You know as
well as I do that some of the taglines that ran on our
favorite books were lurid and excessive, and themselves
didn't represent accurately the seriousness of the work
between the covers; why not permit a gentle smile over the
fact? To insist on high seriousness and not be able to laugh
at ourselves is, I think, to reveal a chip on our
shoulder.
Anthony Mason (the interviewer) and Doug Smith (the producer)
are both serious mystery readers and mystery fans -- they
really know their stuff and have done more than almost anyone
else I know to put authors of quality crime fiction in front
of a large audience. They received a Raven Award some years
back for their work, and they very much deserved it. I think
we should feel fortunate that they found a way to put our
books on television -- and by this I don't just mean that we
at Hard Case Crime should feel fortunate (though lord knows
that's true, and we do), I mean that fans of this sort of
crime fiction in general should feel fortunate to have the
subject of our passion brought to the attention of a wide
audience. I don't feel there was any mockery or
condescension; in fact, I think they caught just the right
elegiac tone when they read the short excerpt from THE
COLORADO KID, and in that brief section of the piece conveyed
quite a lot about what makes this sort of sad and somber
fiction so resonant.
Anyway, that's my take. I loved it, and I believe I would
have loved it even if it hadn't been our books up on the
screen and my scraggly, bearded, snaggle-toothed face
stopping clocks and shattering mirrors all across this fine
nation of ours.
--Charles
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