It’s a small thing, but I’m really thrilled to report that as of today, if you visit the website of the Crime Writers’ Association, you will find that a new sub-genre category has been added to the navigation: ‘experimental/postmodern’.
Of course I don’t only write crime, but I’ve been arguing for this addition behind the scenes for a while, including with a 2018 Guardian ‘Top Ten Experimental Thrillers’ feature, with a recent article for Red Herrings (the in-house journal of the CWA), and in correspondence with former CWA Vice Chair the author Antony Johnston, and with current CWA Chair and author Vaseem Khan. And it was Vaseem who – in an email – came up with this particular formulation – ‘Experimental/postmodern’ – which I think is more self-explanatory and inclusive than the slightly more obscure term ‘Anti-detective’.
As a member of the CWA this is a big deal for me, and for anyone else working at the more experimental or avant-garde end of crime writing as I have been since my ‘avant-pulp’ novel Charlieunclenorfolktango (1999), because this means that books and writing that were once seen by influential literary critics in the field such as Julian Symons as anathema, and practically an existential threat to the genre, can now be accommodated within the crime fiction community, their contribution and vitality recognised, rather than being seen as somehow ‘not proper crime writing.’ Speaking personally, it means that I can now describe my work more accurately in the CWA’s ‘Find an author’ function, and moving forward, that more experimental writing and writers might be recognised and welcomed into the CWA.
The persistence of what critic Sukhdev Sandhu (reviewing my novel The Fountain in the Forest in the Guardian) calls crime fiction’s ‘counter tradition’, which might be traced back to e.g. Jorge Luis Borges’ short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, and Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde true-crime novella Blood on the Dining Room Floor, both published to the English-speaking world in 1948, along with the current good health of the genre, and what critic Laura Wilson recently described as ‘a growing trend of experimentation with form’, proves that Symons’s fears were unfounded. There’s even a ‘Genre-busting’ category in London festival Capital Crime’s Fingerprint Awards.
Many thanks indeed to the the CWA board for agreeing to and implementing this change. I can’t wait to see how authors and readers make use of this new opportunity.
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Buy my latest novel The Fountain in the Forest (Faber, 2018)…
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