It seems, along with recent comments by A.S. Byatt about Harry Potter, that we are talking just as much about class as we are about what Yagoda calls "literary values." Beyond the simple opposition of commercial success vs. true literature, there lies an undercurrent of smugness.

Maybe if Mr. Yagoda wasn't wearing his New Yorker sweater so visibly, his words would be easier to swallow. To add to his running sports metaphor, I'm not sure I would even be allowed to be play ball in his sports complex.

-- Hilesh Patel

I wholeheartedly agree with Ben Yagoda's disillusionment with the mystery novel. I have just read all of Chandler's work over the past two months for the first time. Having completed that, I went looking for more. I read Charles Taylor's "Murder in Midwinter" piece and went out and bought an S.J. Rozan and a Reginald Hill. I made it through the first few pages of each before giving up -- the writing in both was excruciating after having read Chandler (I guess it's excruciating anyway). I have read widely in the fantasy genre and see much the same patterns. Fantasy also has a lot of raving and blathering over each new trilogy even though it's the same tedious story told over and over. There are maybe two writers who could be considered to possess literary quality in the fantasy genre, Gene Wolfe and Mervyn Peake. No, not even Tolkien makes it -- he is a superb technician in creating a big epic with a big back story, but his prose is mediocre at best. Maybe the sheer weight of his popularity has shoved him into the canon but this doesn't actually elevate the quality of his writing.

So it seems that 99 percent of all genre fiction is trash. Can the same be said of contemporary literary fiction? I don't think so (though much of it isn't something I'd like to read). But what causes this difference? It is a different type of writer who is attracted to writing in the genre, vs. one who is attracted toward writing in the general literary arena. This may select for the more intelligent and gifted writers ending up in the literary field, because they quickly perceive the limitations of the genre. But there is another consideration -- the expectations of the reader.

There are conflicting objectives between genre fiction and literature. In genre fiction the reader is expecting an escape from reality and the genre writer writes to this need. In a literary work the writer is trying to render reality the best they can (or in some way make a statement about reality). The literary writer isn't concerned about the need of his reader to be distracted from reality. The literary work may even rub the reader's face in some bitter aspect of reality that the reader would rather avoid. It is the flight from reality that gives genre fiction its inherent mediocrity. Even if you aren't a highly gifted writer, as long as you stick to some aspect of reality in creating a literary effort it will likely come off as a "respectable" work. But it would take an incredibly rare and gifted writer to write in the genre and make it into the literary realm. The challenge of providing an escape while at the same time effectively building on a foundation of reality is simply too difficult a feat for the vast majority of writers.

-- Benjamin Derstine

This opinion piece has a huge, glaring omission: Can you say Erle Stanley Gardner and Dashiell Hammett? Perry Mason and Sam Spade?

It's inconceivable that an author would attempt to deconstruct today's mystery authors without at least a passing nod to these two giants. Hammett led the way with "The Maltese Falcon" (1930) and Gardner followed with his Perry Mason series ("The Case of the Velvet Claws" being the first in 1933). Hammett also wrote "The Thin Man" and many short stories, and Gardner wrote the Cool an, Lam and the Doug Selby series. Chandler's first novel, "The Big Sleep," was published in 1939, by which time Gardner had written 13 Perry Mason novels, three Doug Selby novels and 20 books overall, in addition to hundreds of short stories.

Raymond Chandler is undoubtedly a fantastic writer. However, to suggest that Chandler is the "greatest" writer in this genre is opinion, and certainly open to debate; to assert that "Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald did it first" is to simply ignore history.

-- Mike Westberg

Ben Yagoda's "The Case of the Overrated Mystery Novel" is, to put it bluntly, a lazy bit of cheap sensationalism, written and published because making fans angry is the surest way to provoke responses and make it look like the writer has written something "edgy" and "important."

Yagoda's laziness is evident in that he picks only the easiest targets. Connelly's "City of Bones" is probably that writer's worst book, chosen because it would have been impossible to do such a hatchet job on Connelly's classic, "The Black Echo."

Further, while the headline mentions Dennis Lehane, Yagoda's article doesn't touch upon his work at all. Nor does he mention Robert Crais, except to note that Crais provides a blurb for another book. George P. Pelecanos is also mentioned only in passing. None of the U.K. crime fiction writers (Ian Rankin, Ken Bruen, Stephen Booth, et al.), people who are doing some of the best work in the genre, is even mentioned.

It's all a bit of a cheat, really. It's easy to dis a genre if you ignore its best work by its best writers.

-- Dusty Rhoades

Ben Yagoda is tired of warmed-over angst. Apparently, the best thing he could think to do about it was to warm over some of his own. Woe is Ben; he can't find a detective novel that makes him feel like he did in 1969.

Now, I enjoy and admire some of the mystery writers he derides -- Robert Parker, Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, S.J. Rozan -- but I won't claim that makes their work literature. Some is, I think, and some isn't, but that's a debate for a day with fewer deadlines. What I do find strange is this: If he kept finding himself disappointed by Janet Maslin's recommendations -- or by cover blurbs, though I doubt any published writer is naive enough to believe those -- why didn't he stop heeding them and go exploring on his own? That's what educated, interested people do. They don't just buy what they're told. There's a whole genre out there, Ben, and Maslin doesn't have the time, taste or space for all of it. You've skimmed the surface and buzzed off, complaining about the lack of depth.

You're also not thinking too clearly about literature. For example, you say romanticized, sentimentalized characters run counter to literary values.

Really?

Read "The Brothers Karamazov" lately? Think maybe there's just the merest smidge of romanticization and sentimentalization there? A smidge? One leetle smidgeopovich?

But that was a cheap shot. Everybody knows "The Brothers Karamazov" is literature, so everything in it is good. But "Winter and Night," that's just a mystery -- and one that doesn't make you feel like you did when you were ... how old, again, in 1969?

"The Boston Globe [you wrote] called the book 'very well-written, displaying Rozan's ability to describe place and weather.' I don't know about you, but I'm always in the market for a good weather novel.)"

Snarky. Very snarky. Read any Steinbeck lately?

I'm not saying any old mystery with weather in it is "The Grapes of Wrath." Even "The Grapes of Wrath" apparently isn't "The Grapes of Wrath" -- after all, there are those pesky romanticized characters. So Steinbeck is out too. Dead as Dostoevsky. But no, my point isn't that mysteries are all masterpieces; it's that you make some really weird assumptions about what can't be literature.

Regarding your vow that you are "off these books for good," I don't think anyone will mind. You've skimmed the surface. Now buzz off.

-- Keith Snyder
[Keith Snyder is the author of "The Night Men," "Coffin's Got the Dead Guy on the Inside" and "Trouble Comes Back."]

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