I read Ben Yagoda's article "The Case of the Overrated Mystery Novel" with a great degree of amusement, though probably not the kind the author intended. I could not agree more with his assertion that virtually all of the current authors recognized as being at the top of the motley heap of today's genre are greatly overrated. They are -- and I've never figured out why some of us rise to the top and some of us don't, when 90 percent of us all write at the same level (which is to say, competently enough, but without much originality of voice or subject). God knows Yagoda is also right about the mutual literary masturbation that goes on today in the form of author quotes. That's why you won't see my name on more than three books (all quotes given early in my career) and why I refuse to ask any of my many author friends for blurbs. Frankly, I think begging them to buy me a drink seems a much better use of all of our energies.

To take Yagoda's earth-shattering discovery that choosing a book because of its blurbs leads to nothing but disappointment as a basis for declaring that "the American detective novel may be commercially viable, but it is devoid of creative or artistic interest" is just plain idiotic. Just because Yagoda is too clueless to know that marketing forces drive what books are displayed on most bookstore shelves today -- and that literary merit exists only in a handful of dusty tomes championed by your ever-optimistic independent bookstore owner -- does not mean that our genre is devoid of original, evocative and astonishingly relevant books. Don't blame all of us, dude, if you're too lazy to get out there and find them.

I am not the least bit surprised Yagoda hasn't run into a truly good crime fiction book by a contemporary author. I'm surprised any get published at all. As I told another writer friend recently, editors buy you because you're different -- and then they spend the rest of your career trying to turn you into everyone else.

Why are there so many bad books out there? For starters, because very few people in this business -- not editors, not bookstore owners and not even readers -- seem to have the patience, time or willingness to read a book for its merit. Everyone wants a hook, an instant marketing label, a neat category to fulcrum an author into so that they can make the buy-or-pass decision and then move on to the next book in a never-ending quest for the next Big Thing. And no one wants to take a chance on something truly good, because then it would be too different.

Secondly, not one reader in 100 these days really wants a good book that makes them think. We live in a dumbed-down country filled with people raised on the mediocrity of television who want to remain blissfully stupid yet are driven by an overwhelming need to assure themselves that they are not stupid. They don't want a book that makes them think too much, or examine their feelings too closely or, worse yet, look inward at their own apathy and their role in how the world around them has evolved. They want entertainment, they want a way to kill time, they want their shallow views validated with shallow prose, they want to experience faux-emotions as quickly as possible (which means they damn sure don't want subtlety) and they want a nice twist at the end so that they can imagine they've guessed it before their co-workers or neighbors did. They want to be able to finish a book and say, "Aha! I knew who it was 40 pages before the end!" (Yeah, you genius, you and 70 million other people!)

Yagoda seems to find it discouraging to be a crime fiction reader these days. Hell, he should try being a crime fiction writer. More specifically, he should try being a writer who is dismayed with the quality of the genre -- just as he is -- and who despairs at the literally dozens of mediocre titles published each month that only serve to obscure the rare good ones. He should try telling himself every day that the measure of a good writer is not in how many copies he or she sells, but in how well you connect with your own world of readers and truly get your message across.

It's almost impossible to sell a book that takes a distinct stand on our society as Chandler did. And then, once you do manage to sell it -- when sales verify that not too many people really want to read such a book -- it's damn near impossible to keep writing good ones. It takes walking away from once-a-year, multiple book contracts; it takes rejecting virtually every measurement of success treasured by peers you respect; and it takes a hell of a lot of guts to declare that you are simply going to write the best book you can write and who the hell cares how many copies you sell? Yet doing that is the only way you're going to buck the marketing juggernaut that dumbs us all down and the only way you'll ever produce a truly good book.

There are some crime fiction authors trying to do that right now. My book club here in Durham, N.C., discovers such authors all the time. But we do not discover them by reading blurbs. We do it by actually opening the cover of a book and reading a sample chapter of it, or going online and asking other intelligent people for recommendations, or heading out to consult our local librarians because, God bless them, they may be the only people in the book business left to whom literary merit actually counts.

I could tell Yagoda who some of these authors are, but as punishment for that cheap shot he took at S.J. Rozan, I'm not going to. As penance, I think he deserves to do the work for himself. You see, I hang out with the same guys S.J. hangs out with and I've got some bad news for the faint of heart among us: Yes, goddamnit, they do talk that way.

-- Katy Munger
[Katy Munger is the author of "Better Off Dead," "Bad to the Bone," "Money to Burn" and other novels. She reviews mysteries for the Washington Post.]

Ben Yagoda's article on the modern crime novel mentions a number of acclaimed crime novelists (including Dennis Lehane, George P. Pelecanos and Robert Crais) without indicating that he's actually read them. I'd like to publish an article in which I say, "I tried something by that DeLillo and that Rushdie and that Franzen, and I didn't like them. Modern literary novels by such writers as Jeffrey Eugenides, Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon are also not worth my time. They have blurbed some authors I didn't like, who have won some awards. Hemingway did it better 50 years ago." Such an argument would be laughed off the page, but somehow, tarring all genre novelists with the same brush based on limited experience is perfectly fine?

Just one example: Yagoda fails to take into account the series aspect of the detective novel. The only book he discusses in detail, "City of Bones" by Michael Connelly, is indeed a late installment in a long-running series. The character of Harry Bosch has evolved over the years by subtle degrees that can be appreciated by readers who have been following the series over time. Would anyone tune into, say, "The Sopranos" for the first time in the third season and blame the writers because he didn't "get" it?

Nothing says that Yagoda has to like contemporary crime fiction. He's entitled to his opinion, but he shouldn't try to pretend that it's an informed one.

-- Carrie Pruett

Yagoda doesn't even touch Dennis Lehane in his article on the state of hard-boiled fiction. Lehane's work (his series Kenzie/Gennaro fiction, at least) is a cut above all the work discussed in his article (particularly the reprehensibly repetitive Bosch books), and deserves the accolades people give it. He's stopped the series to avoid dilution, and while "Mystic River" and "Shutter Island" aren't particularly great, he's still a buy-on-sight author for me. It's also telling (to me, at least) that the only books I've kept from the genre are his, Chandler's and Dashiell Hammett's.

-- Nathan Lundblad

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