In an article earlier this week in the Publishers Weekly Talkback section, Jordan Foster writes about breaking the wall of crime fiction.
What separates the genre of crime fiction from literary fiction may be more membrane than wall, Foster writes, but it's still a barrier that is often tricky to penetrate. The very act of categorizing brings with it an implicit ranking and the idea that anything shelved under “genre” is somehow lacking. In particular, the genre's rigidness of structure seems to work against it. Yet crime novelists have come up with myriad ways to work around this perceived limitation.
In the end, Foster writes, what matters to writers and readers of crime fiction—and fiction in general—is the quality of the writing, the depth of the characters, the intricacies of the plot, and the richness of the setting. “When you're working to make a sentence as perfect as it can be,” says Tana French, author of the Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox mystery series, “or to make a character real and vivid and three-dimensional, how and whether you do that isn't dependent on where the book will be shelved.”
Read this interesting article in its entirety here.
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