Is It Time Yet?

Not everyone is pleased to see Tom Rob Smith’s first novel, Child 44, a serial-killer thriller set in Stalinist Russia, find a place on this year’s longlist of nominees for the Man Booker Prize. In a piece for the Los Angeles Times, critic-blogger Sarah Weinman quotes Canongate Books publisher Jamie Byng as saying, “I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like ‘Child 44,’ a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that.”

But Weinman suggests that the inclusion of Child 44--the first thriller to be named on the Booker longlist “since such lists were made public and official in 2001”--may not be quite the aberration it seems. “Indeed,” she writes, “this is the most recent example of the blurring of the line between crime fiction and literature, which makes me hopeful that the so-called genre wars are lurching toward, if not [to] an end, then at least a tentative cease-fire.” She goes on to recount the notorious history of crime and thriller fiction being overlooked and dissed by noteworthy critics, but also points out how genre awards, including the Edgars, have increasingly gone to authors of more or less mainstream fiction.

What’s most remarkable about Child 44’s nomination is that the novel isn’t really all that remarkable--a point well made in Weinman’s piece by both Byng and American-born, London-based reviewer Michael Carlson. It’s certainly a propulsive read, a good, solid thriller with characters finding their places up and down the range of moral virtues and (mostly) vices; and it bears in its protagonist and his wife two brilliantly nuanced figures whom readers ought to be anxious to see more of in the near future. Nonetheless, Child 44’s basic plot--about dead children and the realization that some one individual is behind their slayings--isn’t a ground-breaker. The book itself is less a standout than several others published this year, including Philip Kerr’s A Quiet Flame and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. What’s most significant about Smith’s work is that the combination of publicity, trenchant storytelling, and perhaps a willingness among judges to see beyond the blinkered limits of what should be considered “literary” in 2008 have combined to earn crime fiction a place at the Big Name Awards table. A place that it has deserved for many years already.

Child 44 might finally be the novel to set a precedent. (In prizes as in politics, 2008 could turn out to be the year that hope makes a comeback.) But even if it isn’t, its nomination for the Booker will have opened a door through which other crime, thriller, and mystery fiction works might one day pass. Proudly.

READ MORE: “Confessions of a (Somewhat) Biased Reader,” by Sandra Ruttan (On Life & Other Inconveniences); “One Step,” by Xavier Lechard (At the Villa Rose).