Not long ago, I had the chance to talk with Morgan about his excellent “future noir” novel from 2007, Black Man (also known in the States as Thirteen), and how it was nominated for a Gumshoe Award--a commendation usually given to straightforward crime fiction. We got into a whole riff about how respectful crime-fiction fans are, when compared with science-fiction fans, and as we chatted, Morgan took notes. It seems he’d been commissioned to write a piece on this very topic. As it turned out, the publisher decided his finished essay was too controversial for publication. But Morgan, not being fearful of courting strong opinions, decided to post--on his own Web site--his thoughts on why SF fans are more filled with vitriol than their crime-fiction-loving cousins.
He writes, in part:
Suffice it to say that while all this made for a fascinating conversation, neither Ali nor I could nail down any conclusive explanation for the difference. See, it is true that there’s more money around in crime fiction, the market is about five or six times as large. But that doesn’t mean crime writers are all getting rich. A Nielsen survey in 2003 found that a massive fifty percent of all crime sales the previous year were accounted for by just fifteen bestselling writers. And that leaves a lot of little guys out in the cold. Quoting the survey, an article in The Independent sounded the alert that publishers were taking a pretty savage axe to their crime lists, dropping less popular writers and cutting back on their output of new talent. And as for respectability, well, in the very same article, no lesser crime luminary than Ian Rankin was quoted as saying that the literary mainstream still seemed blind in their elitism to any idea that there might be quality writing coming out of the crime genre.Click here to find Morgan’s full essay.
1 comment:
I nominated Morgan for the Gumshoe, actually.
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