This is the first part of a two-part interview
Patrick Anderson of The Washington Post has my dream job. As I mention to him in the interview he gets to do what I would love to do: Get paid to read mysteries and thrillers and then write what I think.
But I figure if I can't have his job the next best step is to read his book, Triumph of the Thriller, and interview him about the book and his job.
His book is an exploration of my favorite genre, mysteries, and he dishes the dirt on who is really bad along with who is really good. He also tackles an issue that has always fascinated me: Why the literary establishment fails to consider mysteries as "real" literature.
His reviews run on Mondays in the Washington Post. More often than not he and I are reviewing some of the same books. We share opinions on some of the writes he cites as great and underwhelming.
He has been gracious enough to wait to do this interview until I finished some personal work first.
Scott: What is it about the mystery and crime novels that so fascinates readers?
Patrick: It's a combination of things. People have always loved suspense, going back to the Holmes stories and Agatha Christie and many others. In the last half century, as a lot of "literary" fiction has become increasingly murky, people have turned to crime fiction and thrillers because they stress plot and storytelling. And in the last twenty years or so, as thrillers have become more popular, more and more of the best young writers have been drawn to them, because that's where the action is and the big paydays. Dennis Lehane is one example among many. So the quality of the writing is far superior today to what it was in the past.
Scott: What was your intent with this book?
Patrick: Five years ago The Washington Post asked me to review crime fiction and thrillers each Monday. Over the years, I'd read a lot in the genre for pleasure – John D. MacDonald, Michael Connelly, Lawrence Sanders, Elmore Leonard and various others – but as I went deeper into current thrillers, two things became clear to me. First, that they'd become the mainstream of American popular fiction. This wasn't always the case. Go back to the Fifties or the Sixties and it was James Michener, Jackie Susann, Herman Wouk and the like.
But look at the bestseller lists today any Sunday and crime fiction and thrillers dominate the list. Some are good, some are terrible, but that's what people are reading. And I didn't think enough attention had been paid to that fact and why it had come about. The second thing I noticed was that there was some tremendous talent at work in thrillers and I didn't think enough attention had been paid to them, either.
So I wrote The Triumph of the Thriller to discuss the genre in general and some of its outstanding practitioners.
Maybe this is the place to say that I, and most people in the book business, use "thriller" as an umbrella term that includes crime fiction, spy fiction, legal thrillers and various other subgenres. The main difference between a "mystery" and a "thriller,' I think, has to do with the level of violence. Clearly, the Hannibal Lecter books are thrillers and the Agatha Christie books are mysteries, but there are books in the middle where the definitions get fuzzy. If you want to argue that the Harry Bosch books are police procedurals, not thrillers, that is fine, but I and most people would call them thrillers. Not that it really matters a lot. The emphasis should be on the quality of the writing, not categories.
Scott: I noticed you singled out for praise in your book Michael Connelly, someone I've also been praising for years. What is it about him that makes him a stand-out writer?
Patrick: I think Connelly does it all right. The writing, plotting and characterizations are excellent. Bosch is a strong character who we've seen change over the course of a dozen or more books. The out-of-control guy of the early books has become a kind of saint, pursuing what he calls "the blue religion." Connelly started out as a great police reporter and he knows the police culture as well as anyone. And his books have moral content.
There are a lot of current writers I admire. I think Dennis Lehane's Mystic River is simply a great American novel, like Lonesome Dove or Main Street or The Grapes of Wrath. I think Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambsis the best modern thriller anyone has yet written. I think George Pelecanos' DC novels, particularly the Derek Strange quartet, are brilliant and uncompromising. I think Elmore Leonard is wonderful and I have great admiration for James Lee Burke, Martin Cruz Smith, Laura Lippman and numerous others. But I don't see that any other American – past or present – has produced a body of work equal to the Bosch series.
Scott: I confess to skipping ahead to the chapter where you unload on some bad best-selling writers including Patricia Cornwell, David Baldacci and James Patterson. This made me smile because I've criticized Cornwell and Baldacci in print. It's like we're long lost twins. What did you find so bothersome about Cornwell and Baldacci?
Patrick: I've read only one of Patterson's novels and part of another. Some years ago I started his Kiss the Girls, about a man who kidnapped, raped and murdered young women. I thought it was dumb and tasteless and exploitive and gave up after a few chapters. Later, in a review, I called it "sick, sexist, sadistic and sub-literate," and I think that sums it up. I reviewed The Beach House and thought it was just dumb. like a bad comic strip. If people enjoy his stuff, that's fine, but I don't see how anyone who knows anything about good writing could read him for pleasure.
The first – and last – Cornwell novel I read was Trace. It was ridiculous how she glorifies her heroine, whom she clearly sees as version of herself. She's somewhere between Wonder Woman and a Greek goddess. A lot of people wrote to thank me for my review. They said that her early novels were good but that for some reason – perhaps having to do with her personal life – her work had fallen apart.
I think Baldacci probably has more talent but has set out to write Patterson-like bestsellers which make no sense but offer a lot of cheap thrills. This is how I closed my review of Baldacci's Hour Game:
Scott: You devote a full chapter to Tom Clancy's"literary offenses," another writer I used to take relish in writing negative reviews of until I decided that it wasn't worth the time or effort. What's your beef with Clancy and why do you think he's so popular?
Patrick: Clancy is a mixed bag. He dreams up big, ambitious plots and at his best he's a good storyteller. I think of him as a political novelist. If you like his right-wing politics you'll probably like his books. I don't like his politics, plus I don't think he writes very well, he has no ear for dialogue, he repeats himself endlessly, and his plots are often just silly. I set this out in detail in my chapter on Clancy, for anyone who's interested.
Scott: I want to ask your opinion on two other crime writers, both of whom I'm in the process of interviewing and reviewing, James Lee Burke and Robert Parker. Both are best-sellers yet both have their detractors. What's your take on them?
Patrick: I think Burke is very good. He's a lyrical writer who captures the American South very well. He also writes very well about crime and violence and he writes serious books. I admire his work. I reviewed a book by the Australian writer Peter Temple recently and he shares Burke's ability to combine both poetry and extreme violence. I don't see how anyone could not admire Burke unless they're put off by his violence.
I haven't read much Parker. I reviewed one of his recent books (it wasn't a Spenser book) and wasn't much impressed. People tell me that his earliest books were his best. Lehane and some other good writers speak of how much he influenced them. When I said Lehane had been influenced by Chandler, he said no, he was influenced by Parker and it was Parker who was influenced by Chandler.
Scott: You do realize you have the dream job of many readers, especially me, right? One of my earliest aspirations in life was to get paid to review books. What's life as a reviewer really like? Do you sit around all week reading? Do you have a special reading chair at work or do you sit in a hammock at home?
Patrick: It's a dream job, sure, if you love books, but it's also a part-time job, which I combine with other projects. I try to read a book over the weekend and write the review on Monday. Deciding what to review can be agonizing, reading the book can be fun or not, depending on the book, and writing the review is fun and challenging – to try to understand the book, to see beyond the obvious and to say something of interest.
As a reviewer, it was interesting to see the reviews of The Triumph of the Thriller. I see the book as a rebuke to a literary establishment that is out of touch with what's happening in American fiction and mostly concerned with hanging onto its own power and prestige. I cite the case a few years ago when the nominees for the National Book Award were four women who live in New York City and sell very few books. I mean, are these National Book Awards or the 92nd Street Y Book Awards? But if they wouldn't nominate Philip Roth that year (for The Plot against America) they damn sure weren't going to consider Connelly or Pelecanos or Lehane, whom some of us would consider more important novelists than the four women..
My reviews struck me as divided between the people who admire good popular fiction and agree with my point of view, and the more 'literary" types who were outraged and offended by my suggestion that they widen their horizons. I must say it was amusing to receive an intelligent review in "Bookgasm," which I'd never heard of before, and a dumb review in the New York Times Book Review (for which I've reviewed, off and on, for forty years). I can't say that I've brought the literary establishment to its knees yet, but it was fun writing the book and it has some fans out there.
Time is on our side. Lehane and Connelly and Pelecanos and some others will live long enough to be accepted as modern masters.
Patrick Anderson of The Washington Post has my dream job. As I mention to him in the interview he gets to do what I would love to do: Get paid to read mysteries and thrillers and then write what I think.
But I figure if I can't have his job the next best step is to read his book, Triumph of the Thriller, and interview him about the book and his job.
His book is an exploration of my favorite genre, mysteries, and he dishes the dirt on who is really bad along with who is really good. He also tackles an issue that has always fascinated me: Why the literary establishment fails to consider mysteries as "real" literature.
His reviews run on Mondays in the Washington Post. More often than not he and I are reviewing some of the same books. We share opinions on some of the writes he cites as great and underwhelming.
He has been gracious enough to wait to do this interview until I finished some personal work first.
Scott: What is it about the mystery and crime novels that so fascinates readers?
Patrick: It's a combination of things. People have always loved suspense, going back to the Holmes stories and Agatha Christie and many others. In the last half century, as a lot of "literary" fiction has become increasingly murky, people have turned to crime fiction and thrillers because they stress plot and storytelling. And in the last twenty years or so, as thrillers have become more popular, more and more of the best young writers have been drawn to them, because that's where the action is and the big paydays. Dennis Lehane is one example among many. So the quality of the writing is far superior today to what it was in the past.
Scott: What was your intent with this book?
Patrick: Five years ago The Washington Post asked me to review crime fiction and thrillers each Monday. Over the years, I'd read a lot in the genre for pleasure – John D. MacDonald, Michael Connelly, Lawrence Sanders, Elmore Leonard and various others – but as I went deeper into current thrillers, two things became clear to me. First, that they'd become the mainstream of American popular fiction. This wasn't always the case. Go back to the Fifties or the Sixties and it was James Michener, Jackie Susann, Herman Wouk and the like.
But look at the bestseller lists today any Sunday and crime fiction and thrillers dominate the list. Some are good, some are terrible, but that's what people are reading. And I didn't think enough attention had been paid to that fact and why it had come about. The second thing I noticed was that there was some tremendous talent at work in thrillers and I didn't think enough attention had been paid to them, either.
So I wrote The Triumph of the Thriller to discuss the genre in general and some of its outstanding practitioners.
Maybe this is the place to say that I, and most people in the book business, use "thriller" as an umbrella term that includes crime fiction, spy fiction, legal thrillers and various other subgenres. The main difference between a "mystery" and a "thriller,' I think, has to do with the level of violence. Clearly, the Hannibal Lecter books are thrillers and the Agatha Christie books are mysteries, but there are books in the middle where the definitions get fuzzy. If you want to argue that the Harry Bosch books are police procedurals, not thrillers, that is fine, but I and most people would call them thrillers. Not that it really matters a lot. The emphasis should be on the quality of the writing, not categories.
Scott: I noticed you singled out for praise in your book Michael Connelly, someone I've also been praising for years. What is it about him that makes him a stand-out writer?
Patrick: I think Connelly does it all right. The writing, plotting and characterizations are excellent. Bosch is a strong character who we've seen change over the course of a dozen or more books. The out-of-control guy of the early books has become a kind of saint, pursuing what he calls "the blue religion." Connelly started out as a great police reporter and he knows the police culture as well as anyone. And his books have moral content.
There are a lot of current writers I admire. I think Dennis Lehane's Mystic River is simply a great American novel, like Lonesome Dove or Main Street or The Grapes of Wrath. I think Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambsis the best modern thriller anyone has yet written. I think George Pelecanos' DC novels, particularly the Derek Strange quartet, are brilliant and uncompromising. I think Elmore Leonard is wonderful and I have great admiration for James Lee Burke, Martin Cruz Smith, Laura Lippman and numerous others. But I don't see that any other American – past or present – has produced a body of work equal to the Bosch series.
Scott: I confess to skipping ahead to the chapter where you unload on some bad best-selling writers including Patricia Cornwell, David Baldacci and James Patterson. This made me smile because I've criticized Cornwell and Baldacci in print. It's like we're long lost twins. What did you find so bothersome about Cornwell and Baldacci?
Patrick: I've read only one of Patterson's novels and part of another. Some years ago I started his Kiss the Girls, about a man who kidnapped, raped and murdered young women. I thought it was dumb and tasteless and exploitive and gave up after a few chapters. Later, in a review, I called it "sick, sexist, sadistic and sub-literate," and I think that sums it up. I reviewed The Beach House and thought it was just dumb. like a bad comic strip. If people enjoy his stuff, that's fine, but I don't see how anyone who knows anything about good writing could read him for pleasure.
The first – and last – Cornwell novel I read was Trace. It was ridiculous how she glorifies her heroine, whom she clearly sees as version of herself. She's somewhere between Wonder Woman and a Greek goddess. A lot of people wrote to thank me for my review. They said that her early novels were good but that for some reason – perhaps having to do with her personal life – her work had fallen apart.
I think Baldacci probably has more talent but has set out to write Patterson-like bestsellers which make no sense but offer a lot of cheap thrills. This is how I closed my review of Baldacci's Hour Game:
In a shootout a moment later, 'Beating odds of probably a billion to one, the two bullets had collided.' Beating odds of probably a billion to one, I survived this novel with my sanity intact. With this book, Baldacci has entered the James Patterson Really Bad Thriller Sweepstakes.As a reviewer, I try to avoid bad writers. I'd rather look for the good writers, because there are a lot of them out there who don't get enough attention. Some of the lesser known writers I've praised include Michael Gruber, Peter Abrahams, Karen Slaughter, Peter Craig, Charlie Huston, Ken Bruen and Adrian McKinty.
Scott: You devote a full chapter to Tom Clancy's"literary offenses," another writer I used to take relish in writing negative reviews of until I decided that it wasn't worth the time or effort. What's your beef with Clancy and why do you think he's so popular?
Patrick: Clancy is a mixed bag. He dreams up big, ambitious plots and at his best he's a good storyteller. I think of him as a political novelist. If you like his right-wing politics you'll probably like his books. I don't like his politics, plus I don't think he writes very well, he has no ear for dialogue, he repeats himself endlessly, and his plots are often just silly. I set this out in detail in my chapter on Clancy, for anyone who's interested.
Scott: I want to ask your opinion on two other crime writers, both of whom I'm in the process of interviewing and reviewing, James Lee Burke and Robert Parker. Both are best-sellers yet both have their detractors. What's your take on them?
Patrick: I think Burke is very good. He's a lyrical writer who captures the American South very well. He also writes very well about crime and violence and he writes serious books. I admire his work. I reviewed a book by the Australian writer Peter Temple recently and he shares Burke's ability to combine both poetry and extreme violence. I don't see how anyone could not admire Burke unless they're put off by his violence.
I haven't read much Parker. I reviewed one of his recent books (it wasn't a Spenser book) and wasn't much impressed. People tell me that his earliest books were his best. Lehane and some other good writers speak of how much he influenced them. When I said Lehane had been influenced by Chandler, he said no, he was influenced by Parker and it was Parker who was influenced by Chandler.
Scott: You do realize you have the dream job of many readers, especially me, right? One of my earliest aspirations in life was to get paid to review books. What's life as a reviewer really like? Do you sit around all week reading? Do you have a special reading chair at work or do you sit in a hammock at home?
Patrick: It's a dream job, sure, if you love books, but it's also a part-time job, which I combine with other projects. I try to read a book over the weekend and write the review on Monday. Deciding what to review can be agonizing, reading the book can be fun or not, depending on the book, and writing the review is fun and challenging – to try to understand the book, to see beyond the obvious and to say something of interest.
As a reviewer, it was interesting to see the reviews of The Triumph of the Thriller. I see the book as a rebuke to a literary establishment that is out of touch with what's happening in American fiction and mostly concerned with hanging onto its own power and prestige. I cite the case a few years ago when the nominees for the National Book Award were four women who live in New York City and sell very few books. I mean, are these National Book Awards or the 92nd Street Y Book Awards? But if they wouldn't nominate Philip Roth that year (for The Plot against America) they damn sure weren't going to consider Connelly or Pelecanos or Lehane, whom some of us would consider more important novelists than the four women..
My reviews struck me as divided between the people who admire good popular fiction and agree with my point of view, and the more 'literary" types who were outraged and offended by my suggestion that they widen their horizons. I must say it was amusing to receive an intelligent review in "Bookgasm," which I'd never heard of before, and a dumb review in the New York Times Book Review (for which I've reviewed, off and on, for forty years). I can't say that I've brought the literary establishment to its knees yet, but it was fun writing the book and it has some fans out there.
Time is on our side. Lehane and Connelly and Pelecanos and some others will live long enough to be accepted as modern masters.
This
is the second part of a two-part interview. In the first part I
lamented how Patrick Anderson has my dream job: Getting paid to read
thrillers and write about them for The Washington Post.
Since then I read the rest of the book and my opinion of him has turned from jealousy to pride, proud that he has the same goal as me even if he does get paid for his work:
The biggest common thread through the book is the question of whether thrillers should be taken seriously, whether the time has come - obviously he says it has - for modern thrillers to be considered good true literature:
You dared to speak ill of Agatha Christie AND Raymond Chandler. Have their fans sent any hate mail? I'm going to watch the noir movies you mention - The Big Sleep, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Maltese Falcon - to see what you were seeing about scenes from the books and films that make no sense. Were you surprised, disappointed and/or frustrated to find these two greats were, well, underwhelming? Why do you think they are considered such greats if they are not all that, well, great?
I don't think I spoke ill of Dame Agatha. She had a genius for clever plots, she was a fine storyteller and she was historically important and immensely successful. What I said was that her work was inevitably uneven, given that she wrote more than 60 novels. I admire novels like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and And Then There Were None, but I also read one of her early novels, Peril at End House, picked at random, and thought it was fluff.
Chandler was a gifted writer, probably the most lyrical of the major crime writers. He was more influenced by Fitzgerald than by Hemingway (and, as I noted, took some cheap shots at Fitzgerald in The Long Goodbye). He often wrote truly beautiful scenes and descriptions.
But two things bother me about Chandler. First, as is pretty generally recognized, his plots are rambling at best and incoherent at worst. I quote, for example, Howard Hawks, who directed the movie version of The Big Sleep, as saying he never did understand what was going on the in book and finally decided it didn't matter. And there's the famous story of Hawks (and William Faulkner, one of the screenwriters) sending Chandler a telegram asking who killed the chauffeur and he wired back: "No idea."
You can read Chandler for the writing, for the mood, for the portrait of Los Angeles, but you'll have a problem if you're looking for a plot that makes much sense. The other problem is that he was amazingly racist and homophobic, and was pretty nasty toward women, too. I cite many examples, such as the opening scene in Farewell, My Lovely, when he ridicules various black people, including the young man he repeatedly calls "it" rather than "him."
His defenders say, "Oh, that just reflects the times," but I don't think that's good enough. You can find touches of racism and homophobia in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but they don't beat up on blacks and gays, and mop the floor with them, and laugh at them. Chandler was an intelligent man but also a rather nasty man at times, and the nastiness made it hard for me to enjoy his books when I went back and reread them. But was he a good writer? Sure. Was he historically important? Sure. Did he have a big influence on later writers? Sure. But he needed a good editor.
Do you agree with my contention that Scott Turow is a better writer of legal thrillers than John Grisham?
Sure, there's no doubt that Turow is a better and more interesting writer than Grisham. He has more depth, more complexity, more moral concern, more of just about everything. But Grisham is the more commercial writer because he comes up with great plots and doesn't make the intellectual demands on his readers that Turow makes. Grisham is an entertainer; Turow is a serious writer who digs deeply into reality.
You introduced me to lots of intriguing writers in your book. I've started a list of authors I'm going to check out – heck interview if possible – including Karin Slaughter, Val McDermid and Ken Bruen. Thank you. There were a few with which I disagreed. You were more dismissive of Robert Crais than I am, for example. And you think more highly of Thomas Harris than I do. I lost a lot of respect for him for the crap that was the Hannibal book.
I only noticed two authors that I didn't see you give credit to that I greatly admire: Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake. Was that because you just couldn't include everyone or do you not like either of those authors?
I think Robert Crais writes skillful action/adventure thrillers about a private investigator, but I don't think he's as interesting as a lot of other novelists like Connelly and Pelecanos and various others who exhibit more depth and complexity.
I think of Thomas Harris as a mad genius. He's a wonderful writer with a very strange, perverse mind. I agree with you that Hannibal was a big let-down after Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. I said in the book that Red Dragon was his warm-up, The Silence of the Lambs was his masterpiece, and Hannibal was his decadence. Still, there was a certain dark fascination in just how far he would take things. In a conventional novel, Starling, the FBI agent, would have captured Lecter, the serial killer, at the end of the novel. Instead, he captured her. The conventional next step would be a sequel in which Clarice comes to her senses and brings the madman to justice. But we have no particular reason to expect Harris to do the conventional thing. He has the problem that in Hannibal he was increasingly trying to win our sympathy for Lecter by presenting other characters who are even more loathsome than he is. But it really doesn't work – Lecter is a monster who needs to be back behind bars, no matter how witty or charming he is. I hope Harris writes another installment and resolves this.
I haven't read much Lawrence Block. A lot of people admire him. I reviewed one of his recent books and it didn't grab me. Maybe the earlier ones were better. I think that some of Westlake's books are a lot of fun. Maybe thirty years ago he wrote a little comedy called "A Likely Story" that is the last word on the tribulations of the writing life. What he does he does very well.
Your bio says you were a speechwriter for the Kennedy and Clinton administration.. How does one go from being a novelist to speech writer to book reviewer for the Washington Post?
I started out as a newspaper reporter and found out that I could take a lot of material, organize it, and write something in the time available. I think my talent is essentially journalistic and I've found that I can apply it to various genres. At thirty I started writing magazine articles for the The New York Times Magazine and others. Then I wrote my first book, which was nonfiction, about the White House staff. Then I wrote my first novel about a young man who worked on the White House staff. I've published nine novels and I think their strengths are essentially journalistic – good dialogue, fast pace, plots that makes sense. (They have some weaknesses too.) I think that if you can write a magazine article or a book you shouldn't have much trouble writing a speech.
The hard part isn't the writing, the hard part is keeping your sanity in the political world, which I more or less did in a couple of campaigns, most notably the Carter campaign of 1976, which I wrote about in a book called Electing Jimmy Carter. I always say that the leap from writing fiction to writing political speeches is not a great one.
Do you think you are a better book reviewer having been through the experience of being published and reviewed yourself?
I hope that having been published and reviewed myself has made me a better reviewer. I'm very sympathetic to novelists. It's a tough business. I know that it's no fun to have your books denounced, or misunderstood, or ignored. I try not to take cheap shots or to beat up on people for the fun of it. Still, my job is to give the reader my best and most honest opinion. At one level, a review is a consumer guide: You're telling the reader whether or not to invest $25 in a book, and that's a lot of money.
I received an interesting e-mail from a reader recently. My reviews appear in the Post on Monday mornings. A woman wrote me about 8 one morning. I'd praised a book and she said she'd gone online to her local library to reserve it and she was already 25th in line. I hope those people thought I gave them good advice.
The press release for your book raises two questions both of which I'd love your answers to since they are good ones. First, "If all writers want to be read, what's wrong with being read by millions?" Second, "Must popularity and artistic merit be mutually exclusive?"
There's nothing wrong with being read by millions. What's wrong is when you write lousy books to attract those millions. Even that's not really wrong – we're talking about consenting adults here – but if I'm asked to review a Patterson novel or a Cornwell novel, it's my job to give my honest opinion, which is that you shouldn't waste your time and money on them. Obviously they're going to sell millions of books no matter what I say. That's okay. They do their thing and I do mine.
Must popularity and artistic merit be mutually exclusive? Certainly not, although you have to define what you mean by "popularity" and by "artistic merit." Most of the writers I most admire have achieved both, from Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Greene and Maugham and Sinclair Lewis to Philip Roth and Larry McMurtry and Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane and Laura Lippman and many others. Sometimes artistic merit means it takes you longer to find your audience – sometimes you never find your audience – but it can be done. It's sad when you read a first novel and think someone is trying to write crap because he thinks it will sell.
People should write the best books they can and hope they get lucky.
Let's end by talking about John Grisham. You compare him to James Michener:
Michener and Grisham. Maybe that's a stretch or maybe I didn't make myself clear, but I think they're both great middlebrow storytellers who were able to reach a huge audience. Yes, Michener's books are certainly more detailed – so detailed I usually found them unreadable – and Grisham is more fast-moving and immediately entertaining. A lot of people think fiction is sinful unless you "learn" something, and Michener's books taught them a great deal about Texas or Hawaii or whatever. And I suppose Grisham's books teach people something about the law, although not as much as Turow would.
Is this intended as one of those back-handed compliment or damning with faint praise?
"Of the mega-selling novelists of recent years – a list that includes Tom Clancy, Daniel Steel, James Patterson, Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell, and not many others – Grisham is easily the best writer, no small distinction."
I take it that you agree with me that Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos, for example, are much better writers but they have not reached the same selling status of those you read? Or am I mis-reading you here?
You're correct about what I said about Grisham and the "mega-selling writers." I don't put Connelly or Pelecanos in that group. They're better writers, and they sell well, but not in the league with Clancy, King, Patterson and the others I mention. I'm just glad to see good crime writers making the bestseller lists, which they weren't doing much until the 1980s – that's why I call my book The Triumph of the Thriller. It took time but good crime fiction found its audience.
Thanks again to Mr. Anderson for the interview. The pleasure was all mine.
I want to end with one last quote from him, regarding all the best-sellers that may sell well but are of very low quality, including Nicholas Sparks, Jeffrey Archer:
Since then I read the rest of the book and my opinion of him has turned from jealousy to pride, proud that he has the same goal as me even if he does get paid for his work:
Jonathan Yardley, the Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, once wrote that Edmund Wilson "saw it as his mission to introduce worthy writers to intelligent lay readers." Clearly I'm not Wilson and the authors I'm championing are not the celebrated modernists he admired, but I like to think I share that admirable goal - to introduce worthy writers to intelligent readers. There are a lot of both out there, and I hope this book helps bring them together.Reading this book was a bit surreal as 95 percent of the time I agreed with his opinions. For example I've long championed Michael Connelly and told everyone to read him. He takes that opinion a step further writing of Connelly and his main protagonist, Harry Bosch:
In my review of City of Bones, I said that the Bosch novels were "the best American crime series now in progress." Several novels later, I'll go further and say that if we consider the depth and seriousness that Connelly has brought to Harry's characterizations, the excellence of his plotting, the precision of his writing, his unsurpassed grasp of the police culture, and the moral gravity of his work, the Bosch novels are the finest crime series anyone has written. There is much competition: McBain, Pelecanos, Burke, Chandler, MacDonald - all have done wonderful work. But I don't think anyone has written at such a high level for so long. For those of us who accept Harry, warts and al, there are few more affecting portraits of an angry, damaged, tormented idealist in American fiction.He has a great chapter addressing a question I often ask of mystery writers - whether they are losing some of their creativity and independence by writing a series with the same character. He gives good examples of how it works fine for some authors but not others.
The biggest common thread through the book is the question of whether thrillers should be taken seriously, whether the time has come - obviously he says it has - for modern thrillers to be considered good true literature:
A lot of people have a hard time making the leap from officially approved "literary" fiction to novels that are fun... 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 Shakespeare."He similarly chafes at labels:
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 rule: 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.With that let us turn to this interview. Anderson begins at, well, the beginning, looking at the history of crime fiction. He devotes an admittedly an inordinate amount of space to Raymond Chandler because he is bothered by some of Chandler's writing
You dared to speak ill of Agatha Christie AND Raymond Chandler. Have their fans sent any hate mail? I'm going to watch the noir movies you mention - The Big Sleep, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Maltese Falcon - to see what you were seeing about scenes from the books and films that make no sense. Were you surprised, disappointed and/or frustrated to find these two greats were, well, underwhelming? Why do you think they are considered such greats if they are not all that, well, great?
I don't think I spoke ill of Dame Agatha. She had a genius for clever plots, she was a fine storyteller and she was historically important and immensely successful. What I said was that her work was inevitably uneven, given that she wrote more than 60 novels. I admire novels like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and And Then There Were None, but I also read one of her early novels, Peril at End House, picked at random, and thought it was fluff.
Chandler was a gifted writer, probably the most lyrical of the major crime writers. He was more influenced by Fitzgerald than by Hemingway (and, as I noted, took some cheap shots at Fitzgerald in The Long Goodbye). He often wrote truly beautiful scenes and descriptions.
But two things bother me about Chandler. First, as is pretty generally recognized, his plots are rambling at best and incoherent at worst. I quote, for example, Howard Hawks, who directed the movie version of The Big Sleep, as saying he never did understand what was going on the in book and finally decided it didn't matter. And there's the famous story of Hawks (and William Faulkner, one of the screenwriters) sending Chandler a telegram asking who killed the chauffeur and he wired back: "No idea."
You can read Chandler for the writing, for the mood, for the portrait of Los Angeles, but you'll have a problem if you're looking for a plot that makes much sense. The other problem is that he was amazingly racist and homophobic, and was pretty nasty toward women, too. I cite many examples, such as the opening scene in Farewell, My Lovely, when he ridicules various black people, including the young man he repeatedly calls "it" rather than "him."
His defenders say, "Oh, that just reflects the times," but I don't think that's good enough. You can find touches of racism and homophobia in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but they don't beat up on blacks and gays, and mop the floor with them, and laugh at them. Chandler was an intelligent man but also a rather nasty man at times, and the nastiness made it hard for me to enjoy his books when I went back and reread them. But was he a good writer? Sure. Was he historically important? Sure. Did he have a big influence on later writers? Sure. But he needed a good editor.
Do you agree with my contention that Scott Turow is a better writer of legal thrillers than John Grisham?
Sure, there's no doubt that Turow is a better and more interesting writer than Grisham. He has more depth, more complexity, more moral concern, more of just about everything. But Grisham is the more commercial writer because he comes up with great plots and doesn't make the intellectual demands on his readers that Turow makes. Grisham is an entertainer; Turow is a serious writer who digs deeply into reality.
You introduced me to lots of intriguing writers in your book. I've started a list of authors I'm going to check out – heck interview if possible – including Karin Slaughter, Val McDermid and Ken Bruen. Thank you. There were a few with which I disagreed. You were more dismissive of Robert Crais than I am, for example. And you think more highly of Thomas Harris than I do. I lost a lot of respect for him for the crap that was the Hannibal book.
I only noticed two authors that I didn't see you give credit to that I greatly admire: Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake. Was that because you just couldn't include everyone or do you not like either of those authors?
I think Robert Crais writes skillful action/adventure thrillers about a private investigator, but I don't think he's as interesting as a lot of other novelists like Connelly and Pelecanos and various others who exhibit more depth and complexity.
I think of Thomas Harris as a mad genius. He's a wonderful writer with a very strange, perverse mind. I agree with you that Hannibal was a big let-down after Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. I said in the book that Red Dragon was his warm-up, The Silence of the Lambs was his masterpiece, and Hannibal was his decadence. Still, there was a certain dark fascination in just how far he would take things. In a conventional novel, Starling, the FBI agent, would have captured Lecter, the serial killer, at the end of the novel. Instead, he captured her. The conventional next step would be a sequel in which Clarice comes to her senses and brings the madman to justice. But we have no particular reason to expect Harris to do the conventional thing. He has the problem that in Hannibal he was increasingly trying to win our sympathy for Lecter by presenting other characters who are even more loathsome than he is. But it really doesn't work – Lecter is a monster who needs to be back behind bars, no matter how witty or charming he is. I hope Harris writes another installment and resolves this.
I haven't read much Lawrence Block. A lot of people admire him. I reviewed one of his recent books and it didn't grab me. Maybe the earlier ones were better. I think that some of Westlake's books are a lot of fun. Maybe thirty years ago he wrote a little comedy called "A Likely Story" that is the last word on the tribulations of the writing life. What he does he does very well.
Your bio says you were a speechwriter for the Kennedy and Clinton administration.. How does one go from being a novelist to speech writer to book reviewer for the Washington Post?
I started out as a newspaper reporter and found out that I could take a lot of material, organize it, and write something in the time available. I think my talent is essentially journalistic and I've found that I can apply it to various genres. At thirty I started writing magazine articles for the The New York Times Magazine and others. Then I wrote my first book, which was nonfiction, about the White House staff. Then I wrote my first novel about a young man who worked on the White House staff. I've published nine novels and I think their strengths are essentially journalistic – good dialogue, fast pace, plots that makes sense. (They have some weaknesses too.) I think that if you can write a magazine article or a book you shouldn't have much trouble writing a speech.
The hard part isn't the writing, the hard part is keeping your sanity in the political world, which I more or less did in a couple of campaigns, most notably the Carter campaign of 1976, which I wrote about in a book called Electing Jimmy Carter. I always say that the leap from writing fiction to writing political speeches is not a great one.
Do you think you are a better book reviewer having been through the experience of being published and reviewed yourself?
I hope that having been published and reviewed myself has made me a better reviewer. I'm very sympathetic to novelists. It's a tough business. I know that it's no fun to have your books denounced, or misunderstood, or ignored. I try not to take cheap shots or to beat up on people for the fun of it. Still, my job is to give the reader my best and most honest opinion. At one level, a review is a consumer guide: You're telling the reader whether or not to invest $25 in a book, and that's a lot of money.
I received an interesting e-mail from a reader recently. My reviews appear in the Post on Monday mornings. A woman wrote me about 8 one morning. I'd praised a book and she said she'd gone online to her local library to reserve it and she was already 25th in line. I hope those people thought I gave them good advice.
The press release for your book raises two questions both of which I'd love your answers to since they are good ones. First, "If all writers want to be read, what's wrong with being read by millions?" Second, "Must popularity and artistic merit be mutually exclusive?"
There's nothing wrong with being read by millions. What's wrong is when you write lousy books to attract those millions. Even that's not really wrong – we're talking about consenting adults here – but if I'm asked to review a Patterson novel or a Cornwell novel, it's my job to give my honest opinion, which is that you shouldn't waste your time and money on them. Obviously they're going to sell millions of books no matter what I say. That's okay. They do their thing and I do mine.
Must popularity and artistic merit be mutually exclusive? Certainly not, although you have to define what you mean by "popularity" and by "artistic merit." Most of the writers I most admire have achieved both, from Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Greene and Maugham and Sinclair Lewis to Philip Roth and Larry McMurtry and Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane and Laura Lippman and many others. Sometimes artistic merit means it takes you longer to find your audience – sometimes you never find your audience – but it can be done. It's sad when you read a first novel and think someone is trying to write crap because he thinks it will sell.
People should write the best books they can and hope they get lucky.
Let's end by talking about John Grisham. You compare him to James Michener:
The two men's subject matter is dissimilar – Michener wrote long, awesomely researched historical novels – but both are great storytellers and both are middlebrows in the best sense of the word. They're intelligent without being intimidating, they don't offend, and they reach out to the largest possible audience.I thought that was an odd comparison. Don't you agree that Michener's books are more thought out, more detail-oriented, less, well, fluffy, than Grisham's
Michener and Grisham. Maybe that's a stretch or maybe I didn't make myself clear, but I think they're both great middlebrow storytellers who were able to reach a huge audience. Yes, Michener's books are certainly more detailed – so detailed I usually found them unreadable – and Grisham is more fast-moving and immediately entertaining. A lot of people think fiction is sinful unless you "learn" something, and Michener's books taught them a great deal about Texas or Hawaii or whatever. And I suppose Grisham's books teach people something about the law, although not as much as Turow would.
Is this intended as one of those back-handed compliment or damning with faint praise?
"Of the mega-selling novelists of recent years – a list that includes Tom Clancy, Daniel Steel, James Patterson, Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell, and not many others – Grisham is easily the best writer, no small distinction."
I take it that you agree with me that Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos, for example, are much better writers but they have not reached the same selling status of those you read? Or am I mis-reading you here?
You're correct about what I said about Grisham and the "mega-selling writers." I don't put Connelly or Pelecanos in that group. They're better writers, and they sell well, but not in the league with Clancy, King, Patterson and the others I mention. I'm just glad to see good crime writers making the bestseller lists, which they weren't doing much until the 1980s – that's why I call my book The Triumph of the Thriller. It took time but good crime fiction found its audience.
Thanks again to Mr. Anderson for the interview. The pleasure was all mine.
I want to end with one last quote from him, regarding all the best-sellers that may sell well but are of very low quality, including Nicholas Sparks, Jeffrey Archer:
So what are we to do with all this deplorable fiction? In the long term, our nation must spend fewer billions on foreign wars and more on literacy programs. In the short term, reviewers (heroic fellows, for the most part) must steer people away from this schlock and toward all those good writers out there.
We would also do well to look on the bright side. There is so many wonderful writing. To be a book lover in America today, able to enjoy the wealth of fine writing that we and the rest of the world produce, is to be blessed. Ultimately, the purveyors of crap are only a nuisance.
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