The case of the overrated mystery novel

Robert Parker, Dennis Lehane, Lawrence Block, Michael Connelly -- I've read them all. Amid the logrolling and endless hype, one thing gets obscured: Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald did it first, and did it a lot better.

By Ben Yagoda

Jan 6, 2004 | Edmund Wilson's 1945 New Yorker essay "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" (the title referred to Agatha Christie's 1926 novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd") more or less demolished the "classical" country-house murder mysteries of Christie and her school. The series detective novel took its place, and today it rules the realm of crime fiction. These books provide pleasure to many loyal fans, which is all to the good. What's not so good is the inflated critical reputation of the better writers, and of the genre as a whole. The American detective novel may be commercially viable, but it is devoid of creative or artistic interest.

It took me a long time to realize this. I got started in this genre in 1969, after reading Eudora Welty's rave review of Ross Macdonald's "The Goodbye Look" on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. I got my parents to drive me to the library, where I took out the novel. I found myself in agreement with Welty, and went on to read nearly all of the rest of Macdonald's novels, which featured and were narrated by private detective Lew Archer. The books worked on multiple levels. As I learned when I later read the greatest worker in this field, Raymond Chandler -- who was at his artistic peak at the time of the Wilson essay -- Macdonald kept the sense of the private eye as a flawed knight patrolling the mean streets, but toned down the emotional volume and the verbal extravagance: Chandler averages one simile a paragraph, Macdonald one a chapter. What the latter writer offered, more than his literary mentor, was, first, coherent plots; second, an almost journalistic interest in the social and economic strata of contemporary Los Angeles; and, third, a consistent and compelling theme: the power of the past to influence the present.

I can't prove this, but it seems to me that the Welty review started a trend: taking a detective writer and anointing him or her as not just a pulp writer (not just a Mickey Spillane) but a purveyor of literature (a Chandler). Such claims were made every year or two, and I dutifully tried each one out. I think the first was Robert Parker. His Spenser books -- I read three or four of them -- were pleasant enough. But they weren't in Macdonald's ballpark, and not in Chandler's sports complex. Some of the observation of behavior and relationships was OK, but what I seem to remember most was a lot of posturing. I went on to the next writer. And then -- like Charlie Brown kicking the football -- to the next.

Each time I'd prowl bookstores and libraries and pick the detective books with the best blurbs. And some have amazing blurbs -- five or six pages of them in the front of the paperbacks, declaring that the book is brilliant or unforgettable or a classic. Sometimes I'd have a slip of paper in my wallet with a recommendation from Janet Maslin, who's inherited Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's habit of devoting a few New York Times columns a year to surveying the best of the best detective novels. In this way I made my way through Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Tony Hillerman, Jonathan Kellerman and a half-dozen others. Sometimes, as in Leonard's case, I truly admired the writer's skill. (I list him as a series writer even though his lead characters have different names. But they are the same guy.) But whether I stayed with the writer for two or three books (Block and Kellerman, who with his sympathetic child shrink, Alex Delaware, follows Macdonald just as Macdonald followed Chandler) or barely was able to finish the first, I always ended up disappointed.

The problem, I came to realize, is that all detective series seem to require two items that run counter to literary values and that, no matter what the author's skills (clean prose, social or psychological observation, plot construction), will artistically doom it. The first is the main character, who is invariably romanticized or sentimentalized and who is always a combination of three not especially interesting things: toughness, efficacy and sensitivity. (When the writer resists applying any or all of these traits, the character ends up being bland.) The second is the very formulaic quality that lets a book be part of a series. Similar things happen in similar ways, which is probably as apt a definition as you'll ever find of how not to make good literature. Chandler -- not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle -- got away with it because he was a genius and an original, Macdonald because he was gifted and started early in the day. Their successors have no such luck.

Next Page: Michael Connelly's "City of Bones" and S.J. Rozan's "Winter and Night": Great blurbs and piles of awards

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