Letters

Yes, detective novels are lousy -- if you're too lazy to search out the good ones! Mystery readers (and quite a few mystery writers) strike back at Ben Yagoda.

Jan 8, 2004 | [Read "The Case of the Overrated Mystery Novel" by Ben Yagoda.]

My father used to tell me never to trust anyone who says never. As in Ben Yagoda saying he's off mystery books for good after deciding through his own first-person research that today's mystery novels don't cut it against the glorious past of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. No one would argue that Macdonald and Chandler are the standard by which most of us mystery writers strive, but to denounce the category completely is the same sort of self-righteous snobbery that ghettoized the genre in the first place. There is a lot of crappy detective/mystery fiction out there. A lot. But there's plenty that is good and wonderful and of literary import. Yagoda doesn't see anything of value because he's obviously not looking for it.

-- E.M. Cosin
[E.M. Cosin is the author of "Zen and the City of Angels" and "Zen and the Art of Murder."]

No wonder Ben Yagoda is fed up. He needs to look past the airport racks once in a while. A few gems to seek out: Joe Lansdale's Hap & Leonard series (East Texas good ol' boys, except one's black, gay and tough as hell, and the other's a self-doubting hippie karate expert; their crime-fighting tends to be accidental and less than strictly legal); Dan Simmons' Joe Kurtz novels, "Hardcase," "Hard Freeze" and "Hard as Nails" (think Parker from the Richard Stark novels, except younger and slightly less sociopathic); and, if you can find it, Ken Layne's crime thriller/media satire, "Dot Con." There's a lot more out there, but that's just off the top of my head.

-- Jim Treacher

"Yagoda is full of baloney," I said to the blonde.

"Really, sport?" She gave me a slow half-wink.

"Heck, yeah," I grunted. "There are at least three mystery writers -- and I'm talking post-Chandler now -- who are still worth their salt.

"Like who, sport?" She was stroking my cheek now, standing in close. "Is this really so important?" she breathed.

"You bet it is," I said, pushing her away. "First there's John D. MacDonald, one of the finest craftsmen who ever plied the trade; you read his Travis McGee to learn how to do it. Then there's Elmore Leonard. Sure, the plots are fluff; but when he's on his game, the dialogue is more real than real life."

"Dig it," she whispered, and tried to kiss me. I moved my face away.

"And James Lee Burke -- where does Yagoda get off dissing Dave Robicheaux? The guy is a true male archetype of our times. And the way Burke writes about Louisiana is somehow sensuously beautiful --"

"Yeah," she said, "like me," and kissed me.

Her lips were soft. A little too soft. "-- but it never skimps on the ugliness and violence that pervades his world there," I finished, and took a quick step backward.

She had the knife in her hand, the hand that had been behind my back.

I shot her, twice. Two little red-rimmed holes. Her expression hardly changed as she went down.

What a world. I hated to do it. But it was the only way I was going to get a chance to sit back down and finish "Jolie Blon's Bounce," and still have time to take another look at "Glitz" and "The Turquoise Lament."

And a guy's got to do what a guy's got to do.

-- Chuck Fager
[Chuck Fager is the author of "Murder Among Friends," "Un-Friendly Persuasion" and other books.]

Gee, Ben, I don't disagree with your take on the mystery novel, but I hate to be left out. I haven't written a lot of novels or won a bunch of prizes, but I think my books stand nicely next to Chandler and Macdonald. Give us guys on the side a chance to be included. Or insulted.

-- James Crumley
[James Crumley is the author of "The Final Country," "Bordersnakes," "The Mexican Tree Duck" and other novels.]

Ben Yagoda's scathing indictment of the current crime and detective fiction genre struck me as curiously self-serving. Yagoda outlined his case against this current crop of writers by selectively "cherry-picking" evidence to support his case like he was Dick Cheney's chief of staff, running a shadow intelligence operation out of the Office of the Vice President. To wit:

How can any discussion of detective fiction that claims "it all started" with Raymond Chandler proceed with even a modicum of credibility and not even mention Dashiell Hammett? Championing Chandler without referencing Hammett is the literary equivalent of stating that Raymond Carver "invented" minimalism, forgetting completely about a man named Ernest Hemingway. Reasonable people can argue the relative merits of both sets of writers, but one cannot credibly argue on any level that Hammett and Hemingway should not be included in the discussion.

Furthermore, Yagoda gratuitously includes Elmore Leonard in his discussion (apparently because he doesn't think much of him), claiming that his main characters are serialized enough to warrant inclusion. But if you are going to include Leonard, then I think you have to include George V. Higgins and, particularly, James Ellroy, both of whom are far superior writers than virtually everyone on Yagoda's hit list. Higgins' first novel, "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," can stand "toe to toe" -- to steal Hemingway's favorite comparative metaphor -- with anything Macdonald or Chandler wrote.

Lastly, how can Yagoda claim to "have read them all" and not mention Walter Mosley? So by omission, Yagoda lumps Ellroy, Mosley and Higgins in with Robert Parker and Michael Connelly? Come on. As we've seen with our current administration, credibility is diminished exponentially when facts that don't fit your thesis are simply omitted.

-- Robert Haswell

I cannot believe that Ben Yagoda's article stating that "the American detective novel ... is devoid of creative or artistic interest" is on the same site that features Charles Taylor, who is the only writer I see these days that has any interest in elevating the modern mystery novel from the realm of fiction to that of literature. I have loved Taylor's interviews with Val McDermid and essays on the merits of the modern mystery, but reading Yagoda's excellent article I couldn't help wondering: If Yagoda and Taylor ever see each other at a bar or in the Salon offices, are they going to fistfight?

-- Russell Mead

So Yagoda's complaint is that few contemporary mystery novelists are geniuses. That's brilliant. Neil Simon isn't Shakespeare. Sebastian Junger isn't Herman Melville. You get the idea.

-- John McCloskey

It's unfortunate that Yagoda, in making such a sweeping appraisal on the state of the mystery novel, refers to such a narrow group of best-selling mystery novelists. While it's clear that his attack is on the "big guns" of the genre, his implication is that the modern mystery novel in general is overrated and that mystery novels today pale in comparison to the classics of the genre. He really needs to look deeper into the genre and he'll discover some outstanding writers who don't get the six-figure advances but who challenge the genre in new and exciting ways. Perhaps it's the public's current preference for mystery novels and the way these books are marketed that are the real issues, and not the state of the mystery novel itself. It's also unforgivable that Yagoda lumps Elmore Leonard into this group of mystery writers, as Mr. Leonard, by his own admission, is a crime writer, and has never had a private eye protagonist.

-- Jason Starr
[Jason Starr is the author of "Hard Feelings," "Tough Luck," the forthcoming "Twisted City" and other novels.]

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