The Tell-Tale Edgar

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The Mystery Writers of America’s awarded their Edgars (the annual prizes named for Mr. Poe, above) at a black-tie banquet in New York on Friday. I am no mystery expert, unlike my colleague Sarah Weinman, and I’m embarrassed to admit that usually many of the nominees are new to me.

Not this year though. Several of the nominees came from the another genre -- literary fiction, it’s called, although I’m growing increasingly uncomfortable with this term. It seems presumptive: Is all other fiction non-literary?

Anyway, the point is that Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, Man Booker Prize winner John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black) and National Book Award nominee Susan Straight were all up for Edgars this year. That’s Literature with a capital L.

Straight took the short story Edgar for ‘The Golden Gopher;’ it can be found in the anthology Los Angeles Noir. I haven’t read the story yet -- I bought the book directly from the publisher, Akashic, at a conference earlier this year and have been dying to get to it -- but I have been to the Golden Gopher of the title, one of downtown L.A.’s first seedy bars to get a high-end makeover.

Other fiction winners include John Hart for his novel, ‘Down River’; Tana French for her debut mystery, ‘In the Woods’; Megan Abbott for her original paperback novel, ‘Queenpin,’ and Tedd Arnold’s young adult mystery, ‘Rat Life.’ Former L.A. prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi won the best factual crime Edgar for his gargantuan work, ‘Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.’

I wonder, are the Edgars are getting a makeover themselves? Why nominate ‘literary’ authors? Is mystery expanding outward? Or are other genres trying to horn in on a lucrative market? Why is Banville writing as Black, instead of just as himself? And what purpose do genre distinctions serve these days?

Carolyn Kellogg