The Literary Value of Crime Fiction

Annamaria on Monday

The title above comes from a collection of essays that I found among my souvenirs. My dear, departed and sorely missed friend, Barbara Fass Leavy, PhD was one of the first and still very rare literature scholars who saw crime fiction as literature.  I introduced Barbara to MIE a coupe of years ago.  You can find that post here. 

Today, I am again taking up the question of the literary merits of crime fiction, but from a slightly different angle, based on an article I found in Dr. Leary's scholarly collection.  This one is from 1944 by a critic described by Wikipedia as:

Edmund Wilson Jr. was an American writer, literary critic, and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

Unlike Dr. Leavy's curious and open-minded approach, Wilson - in his essay, titled "Why Do People Read Detective Stories?" - begins by expressing enormous doubt about  the worth of crime fiction.  His critique begins:

"For years, I have been hearing about detective stories. Almost everybody I know seems to read them, and they have long conversations about them in which I am unable to take part. I am always being reminded that the most serious public figures of our time, from Woodrow Wilson to W. B. Yates, have been addicts of the form."

 Wilson admits that he had been "enchanted" with Sherlock Holmes, but brags that he gave up his pre-snob enthusiasm when he was 12 years old.

He begins the critique in question by rejecting the Nero Wolf stories as "sketchy and skimpy"  and "dim and distant copies of a fairytale poetry of handsome cabs, gloomy London,  and lonely country estates that Rex Stout could hardly duplicate with his backgrounds of a modern New York..."

He goes on to pillory just about all the popular mystery writers of his time: Agatha, Christie, Dashiell Hammett, James Cane, etc., etc.  Not even T. S. Elliot and Graham Green escape his snobby wrath. In his final paragraph, he compares the work of the popular crime writers of the 30's and 40's to the works of Charles Dickens. A yardstick I think is stretching the point.  At least he didn't compare The Maltese Falcon to Macbeth or Dante's Inferno.

What Dr. Barbara Leavy did was much more sensible and scholarly. Since she understood that writers are influenced by the times they live in, Dr. Leavy compared the crime writers of the 1970s (when she began her work about crime fiction) with other writers of "literary" fiction of the period. Barbara's conclusion was that the best crime writers were, and she believed this until the day she died, writing some of the best current literature being published.

RIP Dr. Leavy