Hildegarde

It’s a little cold this morning.  I’ve got to get all my stuff done here and then head out to a local community college for a writer’s conference, where I’m supposed to be speaking–to classes, mostly–as their first mystery writer, ever.  I know there are people out there who get all huffy about the disdain with which academics greet genre fiction, but what strkes me about academic attitudes to the mystery novel is how thoroughly they’re based on hearsay.

By that I mean that very few academics ever seem to actually read mystery novels, and when they do the mystery novels they read tend to be Golden Age rather than recent.  This is even more interesting when you take into account the fact that most of them are also great fans of Mystery! and the A&E productions.  Those are Golden Age, too, but you’d think they’d at least generate some interest in seeing what’s out there on the shelves recently.

In general, the better the institution, the more likely the academic will be to have read Andrew Vachss, say, or Martha Grimes.  There used to be a guy at Yale who knew the field backwards and forwards and was a great champion of all modern mystery writing, pretty much inclusive.  (And–disclosure–wrote reviews, and gave my books very good ones.)

But the very worst of the academic approach to mystery writing does not come from professors who don’t read the stuff and just look down their noses at it.  It comes from the ones who have taken up the mystery as Art, and identified that Art squarely with Chandler, Hammett, and company, sunk deep in a well of Forties “noir” and endless hardboiled cliches.

When I was younger, I used to think that the reason for this was that the hard boiled school was so repetitive, so precious and so fake, there was no chance that it could ever be confused with real Literature, thereby giving the academics who took it up a chance both to indulge their guilty reading pleasures while posing no challenge to their professional commitments.

Now, I’m not so sure.  I wonder sometimes about people’s fantasies.  I’ve always had a very active fantasy life, a place where I sort of star in my own movie, but my fantasies tend to be practical.  Rather than a form of escape, I fantasize as a way to prepare for something I hope I’ll be able to do in the future.

And, me being me, I often do do it in the future.  It may take me longer to get there than I think it will, but if I really want it, I make it happen.  This may be due to the fact that I’m very unlikely to fantasize about things like having J.K. Rowling-sized best sellers or winning the lottery. 

I tend to think myself into places.  That almost always happens when the place I’m in has become too restrictive to me.  And I suppose that’s where I am now.  My phone is full of songs like “Ain’t Back Yet” and “Some Beach, Somewhere.”  That last one sums it up most of the winter these days.

But I wonder if the academics who are so drawn to Forties noir are the kind of people who fantasize about being somebody they are not, without any intention of becoming what they fantasize being.  It’s hard for me to understand what other fascination is to be had in the Golden Age hard boiled novel.  Hammett is at least a writer.  Chandler isn’t even that, and he’s so self-consciously, self-righteously “serious” he’s hard to take seriously.  Then there’s Ross McDonald, who wrote excellently well, but also just reproduced the same book over and over again, with the names changed to protect the overexposed.

I always thought that the choice of a genre was actually the choice of an audience.  When I was first working, my decision to write mysteries rather than go in for more “literary fiction” had nothing to do with liking to read mysteries more than literary fiction.  In those days, I liked quite a lot of what was coming out of the literary end of the business, and that was certainly the direciton I was encouraged to go in by everybody around me.

What pushed me into a different direction was the realization that I couldn’t write literary fiction without pretty much restricting my audience to people just like me–people who’d grown up upper middle class and gone to “name” colleges and worked in either academia or the arts. 

That wouldn’t have been true in the Thirties or Forties.  Hemingway sold to a wide audience.  Fitzgerald sold to a wider one.  Now literary writers not only don’t sell to wide audiences, they don’t even want to.  Witness Jonathan Franzen and that flap about the Oprah Book Club.

But although I sometimes use the books I read to fantasize about being in different places, I almost never use them to fantasize about being different people.

I don’t think I’m perfect, and even at my age, I think there’s a lot I could improve about myself–but I don’t actually want to be anybody else.  I don’t think I ever have.  Even in childhood, when being me was not a walk in the park, I didn’t want to be somebody else. 

And I don’t know why that is.  Certainly lots of people do want to be somebody other than who they are.  That’s why there are people in costume at science fiction and fantasy conventions and why Hogwarts uniforms and toy wands sell to adults as well as children. 

Maybe I’m just flabbergasted that anybody would want to be a Forties hard boiled detective.  Down these mean streets, yes, and with a bottle of Scotch, too, and a sex life that’s something out of a serial killer’s fantasy–if they sleep together, she’s either the murderer or she’s dead, and in either case the affair ends with a corpse instead of a commitment. 

The chances are good that the people I talk to today, unlike the ones I spoke in front of on Sunday, will never have read a modern mystery in their lives, and their teachers–in this case, there will be students from classes who are there as part of an assignment–will want to know if I’ve ever read Agatha Christie. 

So it ought to be interesting.