Last week The Guardianasked 25 crime fiction writers "crime novels should everyone read?" Nothing really wrong with the question. I get it, the newspaper needs to get hits on their website, maybe even fill in column inches if they actually printed the article. The problem lies in the responses – the predominately white male authors whose books were published last century. But before we get into it all, let's introduce the writers The Guardian decided to ask.
The newspaper split the respondents up quite evenly with 10 female and 10 male writers (there was one duo author represented). I didn't look at the sexuality of each writer as Wikipedia only has so much information. Of the 25 writers polled only three were people of color: Jacob Ross, Abir Mukherjee, and Dreda Say Mitchell. The rest, all 22, were white as Casper the Friendly Ghost. I know the crime fiction community has some issues, but since The Guardian was picking and choosing the crime writers, they should have done a better job at this simple task.
Now let's look at the results of the poll. Of the 24 authors chosen all were white. The only person of color was Martin Cruz Smith and he was chosen twice for Gorky Park. The average published year of all the books selected was 1957 making the average age of the books selected 61 years-old. There were four books chosen that were over 100 years old: Bleak House by Charles Dickens, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. And Art Taylor already told us about the problems with Bleak House.
If we removed the 100 plus year-old books from the numbers, the average publishing year would move to 1972 making the books 46 years old.
The youngish books were On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill, Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr, A Place of Execution by Val McDermid, Silence of the Grave byArnaldur Indriðason. Only one woman, but all definitely white. Again. If you removed these books from the list, the average publishing year would be 1945 making the books 70 plus years old.
We all know there are problems in the crime fiction community with diversity and I'm disappointed that the "top writers" in the field as they were called by The Guardian could not have done a more inclusive job in selecting books. Obviously, it is up to us to lead from behind.
If you have a moment, give me some important crime books to read that aren't by white men.
NOTE: This is not to make light of actual mental disorders. I'm not even going to make too much light of this made-up one.
The curse of social media is that when you are scouring your timeline for therapeutic videos of a baby tiger beset upon by friendly otters, you will also be exposed to a gauntlet of distressing news items, from signs of impending dystopia to that violent shredder of self-esteem, awards season.
We're going to talk about writers other than you getting accolades! Quick, watch the tiger and otters video to brace yourself:
There will be some gentle mockery here, because it is coupled with self-deprecation. Two of my favorite writer people were asking if anyone was driven to succeed by spite. And well, you do what works for you, but as someone with a very unhealthy mental outlook when it comes to validation, even I think can't be good. But if it keeps you writing, I guess it's good.
I love awards season because you get to see books you loved get their just deserts. But know, as surely as there are people in the seats at a racetrack who are there for the crashes, that there are people who like to root against as much as they like to root for. (That's a clumsy sentence, but I have a hangover and the beginning of a cold, so go back and parse it.) Maybe you're one of those people. Maybe we all are? I like to think there are a few out there who don't have a secret nemesis they root against. Let's pretend there are.
Even if you don't root against a book that everyone loved but you found incomprehensible, you may feel like you're falling behind during awards season, when your book languishes in obscurity and some book you never heard of wins the triple crown. That's pretty self-explanatory, isn't it? If you haven't read the books that the genre cognoscenti think are important, how can you expect everyone to have read your book? You can blame it on nepotism or some other bitter invention, but when it comes down to it, there are thousands of books out there, and even with a publicity team and word of mouth, not all of them can win or even be nominated. And then of course, maybe your book just isn't the best out there. There's no shame in that. Read books by writers who are better than you, and learn.
That may not work, either. You can watch LeBron James all day and still never win a game of HORSE.
Wait, don't do anything rash! Here's a baby giraffe!!!
This is why I loathe the "I hate writing and writing is painful" trope. Then why the hell are you doing it? You can like having written as the joke guys, but if this makes you miserable, maybe, like the guy who was hitting himself in the face with a hammer, if will feel better when you stop. Joe Lansdale gives some tough-love advice when he says, (paraphrasing) "if you can quit, quit." If you need spite to keep you going, cut that nose off, baby! But there has to be some joy in this beyond the fawning praise of friends and strangers, or what are you even doing?
There's no guarantee of success, even if you persevere. Because we tend to keep moving the goalposts of success. Remember when you wanted to have a short story published, and that was enough? I'm sure there are plenty of you still striving for that laudable goal, and well, keep at it. Read the mags you want to get into, that helps. (If you hate what they publish, why do you want to get published by them? Ask yourself.) Maybe you passed that, and want more. Probably what someone else has gotten, and you're judging your success against theirs, as if it's the only way to "succeed." What's success anyway? Do you want money, or fame, or both? The respect of your peers? Do you want the life of a writer as depicted on a TV show or in a movie you saw at a tender age?
(Personally, Throw Momma From the Train is my goal movie. And I'm the DeVito character).
Dreams don't need to be realistic, but don't let someone else's successes distract you from your own goals. As it has been said again and again, this is not a zero sum game. One writer's success does not take away from yours. Even if they won the award you were nominated for. (Or weren't nominated for.) As I've said before, I'm very happy that there are now other people enjoying the stories I come up with. I'd be thinking them up anyway. That's my outlook, and it helps fend off the envy when great things happen to other people. But I'm not saying don't be spiteful, if that's what works for you!
Roxane Gay says she has a nemesis. She has multiple best sellers, half a million Twitter followers, awards up the wazoo, all in the few short years since I met her at the Sackett Street Writers reading in a beer garden basement. She's a rising star and a great short story writer, and she has a nemesis. So who says you can't have one, if it helps? I mean, don't go all Salieri on them, but if they drive you to work harder and get better, by all means, spite away, pal!
There are writers who win awards and never sell a lot of books. There are writers who sell plenty and never win many awards. There are some who do both or neither, and they have their fans, they keep writing. There are some who write one book because the awards and fame and money either satisfied them or soured them or daunted them into seclusion. The awards don't make you a writer. Writing does. And coincidentally, that is also the best treatment for Award Season Depressive Disorder.
To quote Marty's agent from Throw Momma from the Train:
One day during my freshman year in college, at a small bookstore in Endicott New York, the old working-class town not far from where I went to college - at SUNY Binghmaton - I made what is probably the single greatest book haul of my life. On sale for a few dollars each, the prices written lightly in pencil on the cover page of each book, were these volumes:
I had never read Borges at that point, but I'd heard of him. Curious to give him a try, I bought all four books on the spot. This was during the spring semester, I think; I remember reading Borges for the first time outside on campus and enjoying the warmth and sunshine after a long winter. I don't remember what I was reading for classes during that period, but I do know that I tore through all four of these Borges books and that he then and there became one of my favorite writers. That was in 1981, and since then I have re-read the stories and pieces in these books countless times. I never get tired of Borges. I also found and added - I don't remember when exactly - the collection of mystery stories he wrote with his friend Adolfo Bioy-Casares.
In this collection, a man named Don Isidro Parodi, imprisoned for a murder he didn't commit, is the detective. People come to his Buenos Aires jail cell with their stories of theft and murder, and Parodi, mental giant that he is, solves the crimes without once leaving the confines of his cell. The stories are convoluted, amusing, and a lot of fun. Borges, of course, loved mystery fiction, especially the classic kind, British or American, involving puzzles and ratiocination. So I've got these five books, all published by E.P. Dutton, the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Borges and di Giovanni were close, and in the 1960's and 70's, they worked together in Buenos Aires on these translations. In a famous interview he gave in 1980, Borges said that di Giovanni's translations were better than his originals. Now whether they are or not, I can't say, since I can't read Spanish, but I know that I love these versions of Borges' work and have been opening and reopening these editions for decades. The problem is, I don't want them to fall apart. I'm working on a piece now about Argentinian mystery fiction written during the Juan Peron era, and for the piece, I've gone back yet again to these old E.P. Dutton copies. I re-read the Parodi stories as well as a couple of stories in The Aleph. I handle the books with gentleness, making sure I don't fold the front covers back too far when I'm holding them, careful not to create any new seams in the spine. And the books, well-made, solidly constructed (kudos to Dutton!), remain in good shape. But they can't stay in good shape forever, not if I keep going back to read them. The wear and tear will have to affect them. The spines will crack; pages will come loose. Yet I want to preserve these books. There's a simple solution. Buy new copies of these translations. I can't, though, because after Borges' death in 1986, his widow renegotiated the English translation rights for his works. This renegotiation is a story in and of itself, and I don't want to get into it here. But the final result is that new translations were done for the Borges books and the di Giovanni translations went out of print. I know that until the day I die, I'll be reading Borges. But I can't keep going to these di Giovanni editions unless I'm willing to see them fall apart. They're such treasures to me now, I'm hesitant to open them. I associate Borges' voice, his rhythms, his fiction itself, with everything di Giovanni brought to it, yet it seems the time has come to leave these books on the shelf as objects and get the new translations. It's a sad feeling, I have to say, letting these editions go, as it were, in order to save them, but I've done what I must. I've surrendered to the inevitable. Just yesterday, I went to Amazon and ordered this:
I shouldn't be harsh. The cover isn't much to look at, but this edition does collect all Borges' stories, from the 1930's through the 1980's, in one place. How will I like Andrew Hurley's translations after thirty plus years reading the master through someone else? I don't know. But obviously, I'll be reading from this book, and Borges does remain Borges. That mind, with all the conundrums it presents, remains his mind. Let's just hope this particular edition has the physical strength of the old Dutton books. Because knowing myself and my never-ending fascination with Borges, this volume will be getting a workout.
