![]() Magnifying Glass An icon of a magnifying glass. Comments An icon of a speech bubble, denoting user comments. Close Icon An icon used to represent where to interact to collapse or dismiss a component Comment An icon of a speech bubble. Breaking An icon of an exclamation mark on a circular background. Pause Icon A two-lined pause icon for stopping interactions. Is Not Public An icon of a human eye and eyelashes with a diagonal line through it. Is Public An icon of a human eye and eyelashes. ![]() ![]() Telephone An icon of a traditional telephone receiver. Profile An icon that resembles human head and shoulders. Linked In An icon of the Linked In "in" mark. Facebook An icon of the Facebook "f" mark. Caret An icon of a block arrow pointing to the right. Cancel An icon of a circle with a diagonal line across. And some of the best literature is crime fiction.Calendar An icon of a desk calendar. I think some of the best crime fiction is literature. I don't see a distinction between the two. They are talking about moral questions, taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary situations, and saying to the reader, "How would you cope in this situation?" Or saying, "How would you feel about living in a world in which this these crimes are allowed to happen?" It's a phenomenon.īut the best crime fiction today is actually talking to us about the same things big literary novels are talking about. You only have to look at someone like Stieg Larsson to see somebody who everybody is reading, whether they are professors or whether they work in factories. Without a doubt there is some jealousy over the sales. So I thought, "Why the hell not?"ĭo you think there is some professional jealousy on behalf of literary writers over the fact that crime fiction is remarkably successful? (…) Everything I wanted to say about the world, I could say within the crime format. I wanted it beside the people I was studying - Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark.īut then I started to read crime fiction, and I liked it. So when the first book was published and it went in the crime shelves, I went, "What the hell is this?" and I moved it to the literature section. I just happened to think a detective was a good way of looking at society, and of exploring a city. I was doing a PhD in literature when I started writing my first Rebus novel. It was a problem for me in the early days, but only because I studied literature at university. People were commuting to work on buses and trains they needed things to read and crime fiction gave them a nice easy read while they were traveling. Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels are bestsellersĬrime fiction as a genre grew up with the growth in the lower middle classes, and also with the growth in travel. And suddenly it drifted away from the realm of literature. Dickens used elements of the crime novel in "Bleak House." His very good friend Wilkie Collins basically invented the English crime novel with "The Moonstone."īut then writers started to use amateur detectives, and started to have very outlandish plots, and to have lots of fun with obscure poisons and such. Yeah, but it would take me all day to explain it in depth … When crime fiction started in England it was very much seen as being literature. Can you explain the snobbishness about crime fiction in the English speaking world? In Germany, this separation between crime fiction and the rest of literature doesn't exist. I heard that you used to go into bookshops and move your books out of the crime section into the literary section. It's only recently that literary festivals per se have genre writers in them, whether it be crime, science fiction or historical. You don't want us in your literary club, so we'll make our own club, and we'll help each other out as much as we can. Crime writers tend to stick together we're the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. I'm quite lucky because I am a crime writer and not a literary novelist. So when you put us up against other writers - whether it's in a bar or on a panel - this competitive edge comes into it. Writers, by their very nature, are solitary creatures who don't like competition. More than that, there's a lot of bitching and backbiting, I'd say. That prompted a discussion about the role of the crime novel in literature - and why Rankin finds detective novels a good lens through which to examine life.ĭeutsche Welle: Do you find the encounters with other authors at literary festivals to be stimulating? Ian Rankin - known mostly for his highly praised Inspector Rebus series - told DW that he sometimes feels "like a character in a novel" on the literary circuit, jet-setting around the world and rubbing shoulders with a host of well-known novelists.
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