An Interview With Patrick Anderson, Author of The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction, Part Two

BYLINE: Scott Butki

I received an e-mail recently from a college student in Houston, an English major, asking what thrillers he should read - or whether he should read them at all. “I am racked with guilt if I read any of this stuff. Life is short. I haven.t finished all of Dickens or Shakespeare. Do I have time for detective novels?” I could only advise him that life is longer than he at present understands and that there is time for, say, Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane along with Dickens and and he similarly chafes at it annoys me to see fine writers dismissed as genre writers - crime novelists, spy novelists, and the like - by those who salivate over the latest incomprehensible postmodern gimmickry. A book is a book is a book. Labels are necessary to organize bookstores, but serious readers should pay them no mind. In these pages, I will follow one paramount to judge writers not by their reputations but by the words they put on paper. Reputations are what other people think; this book is what I think.

Read Scott’s article at blogcritics.org.

I could only advise him that life is longer than he at present understands and that there is time for, say, Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane along with Dickens and he similarly chafes at it annoys me to see fine writers dismissed as genre writers - crime novelists, spy novelists, and the like - by those who salivate over the latest incomprehensible postmodern gimmickry.

Punctuation problem there?

Feel free to delete this if you end up making the correction.  It’s like that on the home page too.

Thanks.

i don’t always catch things in pasted pieces.

1. If this guy Anderson thinks Michael Connelly’s work is morally profound he belongs in Pseud’s Corner. No, worse than that: he belongs on the Michael Connelly website.

2. If he is going round saying Chandler’s plots are incoherent he is a malevolent influence on the reading public, a slanderer of the worst kind. Joe Brody did the chauffeur. I have pointed elsewhere on this forum to the weird relationship modern writers have with Hollywood. And can’t he see that Chandler is NOT Marlowe?

3. If he doesn’t take cheap shots at writers or beat up on them (except, it seems, where Raymond Chandler is concerned), he isn’t worth reading. There’s no such thing as an honest opinion.

4. He ends up admitting he’s totally out of touch with popular taste. Nothing more really needs saying. Except, somewhat like the interviewer, I resent it that this guy gets money for having his silly ‘honest opinions’ printed in newspapers and on the garish misleading covers of paperback books whereas I, a serious theorist, can’t even scrape enough money together to buy a decent used Porsche 911.

Gregg, look at the article again from your link.

It should read:

I could only advise him that life is longer than he at present understands and that there is time for, say, Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane along with Dickens and Shakespeare.  It annoys me to see fine writers dismissed as genre writers…

“He similarly chafes at labels:” is Scott’s line.

We may as well get it right.

I got the piece off of Nexis.  Reviewing the actual link I see the formatting differences.

djones - 04 August 2007 02:14 PM

...I resent it that this guy gets money for having his silly ‘honest opinions’ printed in newspapers and on the garish misleading covers of paperback books…

I take it you won’t be reading this one.  Darn shame the vitriol has to end here.

Can’t afford it. If someone sent me a pre publication copy or something It’d be my pleasure to piss all over Anderson. Even his basic premise is nothing but laughable.