I'll go to the library first. I'm not a big book-buyer. But thanks for the recs!

The Onion Field is one of my favourite novels. He really knows his stuff, and you can tell just how deep he lived in it, too.

Plus? As I remember him, a beautiful, beautiful stylist to read.

Wrod. "The Black Marble" is even romantic..probably set me up for MunchnKay.

Wrod. "The Black Marble" is even romantic..probably set me up for MunchnKay.

There's a movie of this, btw, with Paul Prentiss and I think...Robert Foxworth?

Paula Prentiss. Yup.

I remember being disappointed in the movie of Onion Field, just because nothing out there could come within light years of the book.

Did I miss a discussion of the Salon article where the reviewer slagged (what he thought was) the overinflated literary reputation of mysteries?

The problem, I came to realize, is that all detective series seem to require two items that run counter to literary values and that, no matter what the author's skills (clean prose, social or psychological observation, plot construction), will artistically doom it. The first is the main character, who is invariably romanticized or sentimentalized and who is always a combination of three not especially interesting things: toughness, efficacy and sensitivity. (When the writer resists applying any or all of these traits, the character ends up being bland.) The second is the very formulaic quality that lets a book be part of a series. Similar things happen in similar ways, which is probably as apt a definition as you'll ever find of how not to make good literature. Chandler -- not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle -- got away with it because he was a genius and an original, Macdonald because he was gifted and started early in the day. Their successors have no such luck.

I know folks are likely to dismiss any such genre-wide slapdown, but I wonder if there isn't some truth in this. I've often felt like mysteries have the imprimatur of literary approval that fantasy and science fiction doesn't get, and that overpraising mysteries allows the hypothetical (and perhaps mythical) Snobby Reader a chance to slum with the entertaining reads without guilt.

Well, if all the main characters are so inevitably flawed, there might be a point.

Do you think they are?

Overpraising? Are you kidding? I'm still embarassed half the time when people ask me what I'm reading.

To the Snobby Reader, if science fiction and fantasy are in the gutter, mysteries have only barely made it to the curb.

I'm with Jesse. (Still struggling with "That's genre, isn't it?" issue.) Maybe they get a bit more respect than the others, but it's like gonorrhea vs. syphillis(and I can't believe I typed that.)Ginger's metaphor's classier...I'm just Tacky Tackerman lately.