A Latter-day Convert

After making a more than respectable showing with Christine Falls, his first low-key thriller (written under the nom de plume “Benjamin Black”), Irish novelist John Banville appears to be reveling in his new role as a genre writer. To the latest issue of Bookforum, he contributes a review of The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by Otto Penzler, that is two parts analysis of his own evolution as a crime-fiction reader, and one part reassessment of the values early 20th-century “pulp” authors brought to their fiction.

Banville opines that Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels were “forced and even a touch sentimental, for all their elegance and wit and wonderful sheen”; declares that “Pastorale,” James M. Cain’s contribution to Penzler’s behemoth collection, is the finest story in the book; and contends that “Had he chosen to settle early in America, which he later did for some years, [Georges] Simenon would certainly have written for the pulp magazines that flourished in the ’20s and ’30s ...”

Further, Banville sharply contrasts the fast-guns-and-faster-dames sort of crime fiction being sold in the States at that time with what British writers were producing:

On my side of the Atlantic, crime fiction in the interwar years was as far from pulp as it is possible to get. For a start, pulp fiction was written by men--every one of the fifty-three authors featured in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps is male--while almost all the classic English crime writers were women. Essentially, too, these women were middle-class and wrote for middle-class readers; the lower orders got their fictional entertainment from the newspapers. The first crime novels that I read--or, better say, detective novels, since the crime was always of far less importance than its solving--had been written in the ’30s by Agatha Christie. I was reading them in the middle years of the bleak ’50s, when even ten-year-old boys were in need of diversion from the frightening realities of a world locked in a cold war that was steadily getting hotter. Good old Agatha. In her jacket photo--those steely curls, that set of perfect dentures--she was a dead ringer for everybody’s rich aunt. What could be cozier than to curl up on a wet Sunday afternoon with one of her magically unmenacing brainteasers?

From Aunt Agatha I moved on to more sophisticated members of the sorority, such as Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh--whose very name was a conundrum--Josephine Tey, Gladys Mitchell, Dorothy L. Sayers. What was it with these nice, politely brought-up women, what fantasies of violence and revenge did they harbor in their hearts, that so many of them turned to murder, if only fictionally? From the ’30s through to the ’60s, their brand of crime writing held sway in Britain and Ireland, or These Islands, as our contentious archipelago used to be called. Certainly, in that period there were some notable male detective writers--the fiendishly clever Edmund Crispin, for instance, who in real life was Philip Larkin’s pal Bruce Montgomery, and Nicholas Blake, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis’s alter ego and boiler of pots--but they seemed on the whole an effete lot and could not hold a smoking revolver to the ladies.

It’s a good piece, overall, though Banville tries a bit too ardently to prevent the grit of this genre’s untidy roots from getting under his nails. Click here to read more.

READ MORE: “The Big Book of Pulps,” by Ed Gorman.