The Tell-Tale Edgar

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

Comments

[ed]

Well, as someone who was at the Edgar after party at the bar, before succombing to this damn cold, yes. Alas, the match made between literary and genre wasn't meant to last. I talked with a few mystery people who didn't take kindly to John Banville's remarks about how writing a mystery was so easy and refused to understand that, well, Banville was Banville. And in his eyes, writing a mystery WAS easy. Nevertheless, the flames of resentment lapped across the room and continued even when I had tried to explain why Banville, by way of BOOK OF EVIDENCE and other titles, was a special case inured from calumnies.

[Sarah]

The Edgar's gravitation towards literary waters isn't all that new. Ten years ago Robert Clark's MR. WHITE'S CONFESSION took home the Best Novel prize - a fine, fine book, but one that had many people in the mystery bookselling and reading community up in arms because Clark had made comments disdaining the field, and he beat out a number of most established genre types with dedicated fan bases. I still hear mild complaints about Jeffrey Ford's THE GIRL IN THE GLASS taking home the Best PBO category a year or so ago, even though as far as I was concerned, it was far and away the best book of the category.

Ultimately the shortlists and winners reflect the fact that the Edgars are peer-reviewed, so to speak: nominated by writers who view the books from a writing standpoint. So sentences and structure and literary quality will attract writers in a bigger way than they might readers, who above all want a great story. And I'm generalizing, of course, but it's a starting point.