The Crime Warp

Literary or Literacy

The great debate about genre fiction not being literary seems never ending. Quite frankly I don’t care about the labels, what I care about is the fact that often literary fiction is considered to be above and beyond the mass reading market and therefore open to only a few more discerning readers and that makes me cross.

In the UK today illiteracy amongst adults is over 5 million (www.literacytrust.org.uk).

This is appalling and I think puts the whole literary writing snobbery thing into perspective: If people can’t read a label on a medicine bottle, they certainly can’t read a book, literary or not.

However, it was reassuring to learn that the author Stephen Kelman who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011 is actively working with adults in prisons to help with literacy. Funnily enough his novel titled Pigeon English based on a housing estate was considered relevant to the prison community.

As an ex school teacher in inner city Bradford, I know the challenges of engaging young people with reading. I also know how difficult it is to instil a love of reading when a child struggles with the basics through, for example, dyslexia, and to find appropriate age suitable material for an emergent reader as they grow older and into adulthood.

Therefore, I think in this current climate of high illiteracy, it is self indulgent to spend time celebrating fiction that has limited appeal whilst dissing crime and other genre fiction which have a much wider appeal in the mass market. Despite my obvious penchant for crime fiction I am in no way opposed to Literary Fiction. What I am opposed to, however, is people viewing crime fiction as inferior. Surely we should be saying whatever puts a book or a comic or a newspaper into people’s hands should be applauded and put an end to the concept that Peter Stothard seems to hold that only an elite few(presumably selected by him) should be allowed to Blog, Review, Self Publish or maybe even read a label on a medicine label.