Mainstream Versus Mystery Fiction

Introduction

Mainstream fiction encompasses all fictional works that are not published as genre fiction, which is geared to specific markets. Mystery and detective fiction, Westerns, and science fiction are among the most notable examples of genre fiction. Such labels no longer have anything to do with quality or popularity but with the niche into which publishers feel a particular book might fit. Despite what his legions of fans might say, best-selling author writes mostly genre fiction, not mainstream fiction, because his horror novels are published and marketed to a huge but specific audience. In contrast, authors such as and produce mainstream fiction, or literary fiction, as it is often designated by critics and reviewers.

For a long time, distinctions between mainstream and genre mattered greatly, and sophisticated readers avoided genre fiction. However, sometime around the middle of the twentieth century, barriers between “highbrow” and “lowbrow”—that is, between critically regarded and popular fiction—began falling. It may have been the end of World War II, which brought so many changes to the United States, as to other Western countries, but whatever the causes, the once-rigid divisions that had existed for more than a century between what critics separated into “literature” and “mass culture” were erased. Then, the subgenres of American literature—not only mysteries but Westerns, science fiction, and other popular fictional forms—suddenly began finding readers among a much wider audience.

The causes of this social and cultural shift are complex. On the one hand, the advent of paperback publishing changed the way the book trade did business because publishers no longer had to rely on hardback sales for their success. A number of publishers started issuing popular fiction titles wherever they could find them. Although cheap chapbooks and dime novels arose during the nineteenth century, modern mass paperback books can fairly accurately be dated from the creation of Pocket Books in 1939, and the appearance at about the same time of Dell, Avon, Ballantine, Bantam, Penguin, and similar paperback lines. By 1960, some twenty thousand paperback titles were in print in the United States. A crime novel such as ’s I, the Jury (1947) was hardly noticed when it came out in hardcover in 1947 (to mainly hostile reviews), but the twenty-five-cent Signet paperback edition of the book was in its thirty-third printing barely six years later.

On the other hand, novelists in this brave new postwar world began pushing the boundaries of all inherited literary models in new directions. Suddenly, mainstream fiction was adopting the forms, styles, and conventions of what had until then been regarded as subliterary genres. ’s first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), was a Western; ’s second novel, Sirens of Titan (1959), was a work of science fiction; and Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) was a medieval fantasy. Other mainstream writers experimented in other popular forms, even playing with the conventions of literary pornography in works such as the sex spoof Candy (1965) that Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg wrote under the pen name Maxwell Kenton. What had once been a fairly clean line between mainstream fiction and everything else quickly disappeared.

Mystery Fiction as Mainstream Fiction

No genre benefited more from this development than mystery fiction, including crime thrillers and detective novels. Certainly there had been important mystery writers before 1950, such as the American writers and during the 1930s and 1940s. However, even these writers had always had figurative asterisks placed beside their names indicating that although they might be wonderful writers, they were writers clearly working in a literary subgenre. In his Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947), Frank Luther Mott found only eighteen murder mysteries that had attained wide popularity from colonial times to 1945. After 1950, that division between literary and subliterary writers no longer made sense, as established writers who attempted mysteries and writers who produced only mysteries found themselves standing side by side on the best-seller platform.

On one level, all fiction deals with mysteries, and all readers of fiction are literary detectives trying to get to the stories behind the stories, piecing together the evidence the authors give them to come up with solutions to plot complications and character predicaments. Likewise, most fiction is concerned with the same questions that lie at the heart of the mystery genre: the search for truth, the attempt to distinguish between innocence and wrongdoing, questions of right and wrong, and the examination of the consequences of human actions.

In this regard, the classical drama Oedipus Rex (c. 426 BCE) of was a murder mystery two millennia before that label was even invented. In that play, the title character plays a detective slowly revealing the murderer . . . as himself. ’s Macbeth (1606) is a great murder drama, as Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (c. 1600-1601) is a dramatic murder mystery. ’s Jane Eyre and her sister ’s Wuthering Heights (both 1847) are gothic romances with violent mysteries deep within them. Russian author ’s novel Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1886) like his fellow countryman ’s short story “God Sees the Truth but Waits” (1872), is a classic work of crime and retribution. ’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) features a murder solved with the early use of fingerprints, and ’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a thriller combining sex, murder, and other gothic elements. At the heart of ’s great short story “The Killers” (1927) lies a mystery that will never be solved: Why is the Swede being murdered? The literary critic Cleanth Brooks called ’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) “a wonderful detective novel,” while Faulkner’s classic short story “A Rose for Emily” (1924) is a murder mystery readers uncover and solve only in its last line. ’s A Gun for Sale (1936; This Gun for Hire in U.S.) is a noir thriller that was translated to the silver screen in 1942. Greene’s later Brighton Rock (1938) mixes murder with theological issues. These examples could be spun out endlessly.

History of the Mystery Form

The American short-story writer is credited with inventing the modern mystery genre, in “The Murder in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), stories called “tales of ratiocination” that feature detective C. Auguste Dupin, and novels soon followed. The English novelist ’s The Moonstone (1868) is a suspenseful tale of a jewel theft—a crime solved by Sergeant Cuff, possibly the first detective in English fiction. left The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) unsolved at his death, although many later writers have attempted to find a solution and finish the novel.

The mystery form found its first full-time professional practitioner in , who created Sherlock Holmes. The mystery story flourished during the first decades of the twentieth century in both England and America and proliferated through the twentieth century, and broadened out to encompass spy novels and other variants. By the early twenty-first century, most fiction best-seller lists could be expected to have a third to two-thirds of their titles falling into the general mystery category, including detective novels by authors such as , spy novels by authors such as , legal thrillers by authors such as , and other varieties of the genre. A March 2007, Los Angeles Times Book Review list of best-selling fiction included new crime titles by , James Patterson, Joseph Wambaugh, , and J. D. Robb. It might as easily have included—and undoubtedly has in the past—, , , and , or , , , and , or dozens of similar writers.

Mystery in Mainstream

One might ask what constitutes the difference between a genre mystery writer and a serious, mainstream writer who uses mystery themes. Fans of the mystery novel might answer that the difference is small; however, in works written by mainstream writers the storylines generally have greater significance than those in mystery writers’ works, and such works typically resonate more deeply for the readers. At the center of ’s The Great Gatsby (1925), for example, is the mystery of who the shadowy figure of Jay Gatsby is, along with at least two murders (Myrtle Wilson and later Gatsby himself). As readers sort through the evidence that the novel’s unreliable narrator, Nick Carraway, gives them, and try to solve the questions the novel poses, larger meanings emerge. The mystery of Gatsby, for example, is solved only to reveal the failed American Dream at the heart of his meteoric rise and the degeneration and materialism at the core of American life during the 1920s. Myrtle Wilson is killed by Daisy Buchanan driving Gatsby’s car, because she thinks her lover, Tom Buchanan, is behind the wheel. People in this Jazz Age world are beginning to define one another by their possessions, particularly by their cars. Indeed, the very reason Myrtle and Gatsby are killed is that people confuse cars with their drivers. Another indication of this moral bankruptcy is that Gatsby is murdered by his lover’s (Daisy) husband’s (Tom) lover’s (Myrtle) husband (Wilson). Put another way, Tom’s lover’s husband kills Tom’s wife’s lover. It is a world in which relationships, like personal character, are marked by moral confusion, corruption, and violence, and Gatsby is both author and victim of this evil. One could even argue that Gatsby in the end commits suicide, that he knows Daisy will not call him (as she had promised) the day after she killed Myrtle with the car, and is only waiting by his swimming pool for Wilson, the inevitable agent of the fate Gatsby knows is finally his. He has climbed to the top of the American social ladder and seen how empty and shallow the world of this decadent aristocracy really is; he kills himself (or, lets himself be killed) rather than let his dream die.

Walter Mosley Bridges the Divide

If there is one writer who best represents the successful fusion of mainstream and mystery fiction, it might well be the African American novelist and short-story writer . His earliest novels, such as Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), were Easy Rollins mysteries. He has produced ten works in that series with the title character as the hard-boiled Los Angeles private investigator, and nearly all of them have authentic social and historical settings. Little Scarlet (2004), for example, has Easy Rawlins trying to solve a murder case several days after the 1965 Watts riot. Cinnamon Kiss (2005) involves the search for papers incriminating a family with a Nazi past. Mosley’s three Fearless Jones mysteries, such as Fear of the Dark (2006), feature a friend of the Los Angeles second-hand bookseller Paris Minton. Mosley inhabits a tradition of African American mystery writers that stretches from , the creator of a series of fast-paced detective novels set in Harlem, to Stephen L. Carter, the author of the well-respected legal thriller The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002).

Mosley would be considered a great crime writer if these mysteries were his total output. However, he has moved into other genres as well. Through 2007, he had written three works of science fiction, a book for young adults titled Forty-seven (2005), and four works of nonfiction, and his nonfiction articles and essays have appeared in The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Magazine. Mosley’s mainstream fiction stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and other leading journals. He is represented in Prize Stories, 1996: The O. Henry Awards, and he was the guest editor for The Best American Short Stories of 2003. His literary fiction includes two books—Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997) and Walkin’ the Dog (1999). These novels feature a character named Socrates Fortlow, a former con living a precarious life on the edge of Watts, coping with all the crime and tensions of his troubled city, and grappling at the same time with his own troubled past. Surrounded by murder and other acts of violence, living in an abandoned house off an alley in South Central Los Angeles, Fortlow manages not only to overcome his own demons but to help change the racist world that surrounds him.

Mosley renders the people and places of a Los Angeles few other writers attempt to see, and his efforts link him to earlier African American writers such as and in the exploration of issues of race and social class. His 2004 novel The Man in My Basement, is a powerful and compelling short work that can only be described as an existential thriller. Set not in Los Angeles but in Sag Harbor, Long Island, it tells the story of a White man who imprisons himself in the cellar of a Black man, and the changing relationship between the two men. A complex meditation on Black history and Black-White relations, The Man in My Basement examines notions of power, truth, and justice in a manner that may remind readers of the works not only of Wright and Ellison, but of such earlier writers as (“Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby the Scrivener”) and as well. Mosley, in short, transcends the labels.

Hard-Boiled Fiction—Style and Content

Something that blurs the distinction between modern genre mysteries and mainstream mysteries, making it often difficult to tell one from the other, is the fact that both often employ the same hard-boiled style of writing. This style can be traced back to the founding, in 1919, of Black Mask, the pulp magazine that first published the work of Dashiell Hammett and other early detective writers. The hard-boiled style it fostered combined spare, realistic dialogue with a tough-guy tone and attitude, especially in the voices of detective heroes such as Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. This style merged with the prose that Ernest Hemingway was developing in his early short stories and novels during the 1920s. During the 1930s, prose was further influenced by the gritty Depression style of proletarian writers such as , Nelson Algren, and others. By the time of books such as Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937), a tough-guy novel involving smuggling and murder, and John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939), a depiction of the down-and-out in Los Angeles, the hard-boiled style had become a permanent fixture of the American literary landscape. Readers would later find it in the fiction of any number of mainstream writers, from (Post Office, 1971), (True Confessions, 1977), and (Tough Guys Don’t Dance, 1985), to (All the Pretty Horses, 1992) and Don de Lillo (Underworld, 1997). All these mainstream writers are the literary descendants of the first hard-boiled detective writers, but of the novels named, only Dunne’s and Mailer’s are true mysteries. Nevertheless, all are linked to their hard-boiled literary ancestors.

Another issue blurring distinctions between genre and mainstream mysteries is the expanding realism of fiction that developed between World War II and the end of the twentieth century. Novels such William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), ’s City of Night (1963), ’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), ’s Midnight Cowboy (1967), ’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975), and Brett Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero (1985) are all works that pushed fiction deeper and deeper into areas of human life previously unexplored. They often contain graphic depictions of sex, drug use, and violence. However, none of them is considered a mystery novel. Elements in these works that would have made them crime novels a half-century earlier are in the hands of these writers merely gritty depictions of life in urban worlds of late twentieth-century America. Walter Mosley’s mainstream novel Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel (2007) has been called literary pornography by several reviewers for its graphic descriptions of sexual acts.

In 1950, the lurid pulp cover for the paperback of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury was meant to advertise the sex and violence between its covers; twenty-first-century mainstream writers do not need to broadcast their attention to these subjects. Put another way, , the author of The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Confidential (1990), is a crime writer of the first rank; however, many elements that make up his books can be found in the writings of any number of contemporary writers who are not considered mystery writers. Moreover, Ellroy’s lean, telegraphic style, which can be traced back to earlier practitioners of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, can also be found in other contemporary writers who are not crime writers. Distinctions between genre mysteries and mainstream fiction are, in short, often hard to isolate.

This literary history is complicated by the emergence of the postmodernism that colored so much literature at the end of the twentieth century. The literary qualities that critics find in the fiction of writers such as , Thomas Pynchon, , and many others of the second half of the twentieth century—the indeterminate or plural meanings, the discontinuities or circularities of structure, the irony and ambiguity—turn much prose fiction into literary puzzles that scholars and teachers must attempt to solve. A short fictional narrative by Jorge Luis Borges, for example, may be a puzzle in which the reader works to decipher the meaning—in the same way, a century and a half earlier, readers tried to decode stories such as Poe’s “The Gold Bug” or “The Masque of the Red Death.” The mystery story has thus come full circle.

Modern Mainstream Mysteries

It is clear that distinctions between contemporary mystery writers and mainstream writers are increasingly difficult to find, and authors on both sides of the divide move easily back and forth across it. Many readers rely on reviewers and critics to identify the best mystery writers and the mainstream writers whose works contain mystery themes. The early 1980s saw a number of first-rate mysteries in the United States, including early works by Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, Thomas Harris, and Tony Hillerman, as well as ’s Gorky Park (1981), which Time magazine dubbed the “thriller of the eighties.” That period also saw works by a number of mainstream writers containing mystery themes. would produce a dozen works of fiction over the next several decades, including A Thousand Acres (1991), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, but one of her first novels was the taut mystery Duplicate Keys (1984), a chilling and suspenseful tale that follows a double-murder among a group of friends in New York City. The qualities that came to be known as Smiley’s trademarks—her range, her intelligence, her instinctive sense for setting and character—are clearly evident in this early literary thriller.

’s Il nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose, 1983) is an even more telling example of crossover writing. The novel would eventually sell more than fifty million copies worldwide and be made into a popular film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater. However, the appearance of the novel during the early 1980s was something of a shock. Eco was an Italian academic best known for his works of philosophy and history, a writer whose previous publications were thick books of medieval philosophy on subjects such as the aesthetics of and literary theory on subjects such as the theory of semiotics. Although there are links to both fields in The Name of the Rose, few readers who knew of Eco’s work could have anticipated his novel—a medieval mystery set in a monastic library in Italy.

The Name of the Rose has a central detective, the English Brother William of Baskerville, who employs his enormous powers of logic and deduction—which are realistic uses of the scholastic method popular during the fourteenth century—to solve the murder case, along with a fascinating cast of villains and heroes. The novel is full of arcane medieval information, passages in Latin, descriptions of Church history, and numerous literary references and puns. For example, the character name “Jorge of Burgos” is a play upon the name of the South American writer Jorge Luis Borges, and Brother William’s Baskerville connection is an obvious homage to a famous Sherlock Holmes story. Despite its complexity and unusual makeup, Eco’s novel became an international bestseller and critical success matched by few mysteries in the history of publishing.

Other late twentieth and early twenty-first century international mysteries by major writers include The Savage Detectives (1998/2007) by the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano and Christine Falls (2007), The Lock-Up (2023), and Drowned (2024) by English author , who writes as Benjamin Black. British mainstream works using the conventions and devices of the mystery novel include ’s When We Were Orphans (2000) and Klara and the Sun (2021) and ’s Fury (2001) and Victory City (2023). There may be no British writer who is considered more mainstream than , the author of a dozen critically acclaimed novels and winner of numerous literary awards. His novel Saturday (2005) is not a traditional mystery novel; nevertheless, it is filled with the same fictional qualities found in that genre—most notably tension, suspense, and terror. The novel concerns a day in the life of a British neurosurgeon that begins with a sign of warning (a plane with its wing on fire heading toward Heathrow airport), involves a car accident and menacing confrontation with a hoodlum, and ends with the surgeon’s family being held hostage by two toughs threatening rape and murder. The novel has been called by reviewers an example of a new kind of post-9/11 fiction, in which McEwan has translated the acts of terror of September 11, 2001, and the menace and dread of its aftermath, into the lives of fictional characters. If Saturday is not a traditional mystery novel, it is missing only the detective, for it has all the crime, violence, suspense, and psychological fear that any mystery reader could demand.

Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George (2005) is a similarly complex example of modern mystery fiction. A fictional re-creation of a real-life nineteenth-century detective story, the novel shifts back and forth between the story of the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the history of a young British Indian named George Edalji, the son of a Parsi Anglican vicar and a Scottish mother. The two are drawn together when Doyle investigates the crimes that have wrongly sent Edalji to prison. Although the mysteries at the heart of the novel are never fully solved, the book is a literary thriller with a real-life detective—a man who also happens to be the creator of one of the first detectives in English fiction—and the exploration of issues of love and loss, identity and racial prejudice. Barnes earlier wrote two straight mystery novels under the pen name Dan Kavanagh: Fiddle City (1981) and Going to the Dogs (1987). With Arthur and George, he has produced a complex mainstream novel with mystery themes. His other works of literary fiction include the Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011) and Elizabeth Finch (2022). The Sense of an Ending features an unreliable narrator telling the story of his past as he comes to terms with it. Elizabeth Finch perfectly depicts Barnes's fictional writing technique, with an inclusion of a nonfictional element, Julian the Apostate, unconventional examples of love, and inspirational characters with intricate histories. Another modern fiction author, Colson Whitehead, publishes works often featuring themes and plotlines that reflect the real oppression and racism experienced in American society, including Crook Manifesto (2023), as well as his Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction novels The Nickel Boys (2019) and The Underground Railroad (2017). Other important mystery and mainstream fiction authors include Donna Tartt, Walter Mosley, Yasmin Angoe, and Haruki Murakami.

Conclusions

The conclusions to this history are not hard to locate. The tendencies readers have witnessed in books of the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first will undoubtedly last, and mainstream writers will continue to produce fiction with the thematic and formal elements of the mystery genre, just as mystery writers continue to produce critically and commercially successful fiction. Like other literary trends of the late twentieth century—such as the emergence of ethnic voices across a broad literary spectrum, the interchange of forms and devices between fiction and nonfiction—the marriage of mystery and mainstream can only broaden and deepen the reading experience. Since the mid-twentieth century, the literary conventions and moods of mystery fiction have inextricably worked themselves into a number of works of mainstream fiction at the same time many mainstream writers have attempted the mystery genre. That cross-pollination is most readily apparent in a writer such as Walter Mosley, whose mainstream novels have the settings and language of detective fiction, at the same time as his mysteries have the deeper social commentary that readers previously expected to find only in mainstream fiction. This crossover process is expected to be apparent among increasing numbers of writers.

Bibliography

Ashley, Mike, compiler. The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction. Carroll & Graf, 2002.

Ashman, Nathan. The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology. Routledge, 2024.

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor, compilers. A Catalogue of Crime. Rev. ed., Harper & Row, 1989.

Bleiler, Richard J. Reference Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. 2nd ed., Libraries Unlimited, 2004.

Herbert, Rosemary, et al., editors. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. Oxford UP, 1999.

Merivale, Patricia, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, editors. Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. University of Pennsylvania, 1999.

Pronzini, Bill, and Marcia Muller, editors. 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. New York: Arbor House, 1986.