Do Crime Novels Rank with the Greatest Books Ever?
If you’ve ever suspected that literary critics look down their noses at crime fiction, we now have data to confirm your suspicions.
The data is found on a new website called “The Greatest Books of All Time”, which uses an algorithm to assess which books perform the best on credible lists of literary landmarks. Its creator Shane Sherman has updated the list a few times, but one thing you can count on is your favorite crime novels won’t be appearing near the top.
I first became aware of the site when I read about it in The Economist in July, when the British magazine calculated how long it would take to read the top books on the list.
“Its creator, Shane Sherman, a computer programmer in Texas, has used more than 300 lists to come up with a list of lists, which he calls, not entirely seriously, the ‘greatest books of all time’ (GBOATs),” says The Economist. “It has more than 10,000 books, ranked by how often they appear on the constituent lists.”
You can spend days poking through this website – it’s pure biblio-porn. You’ll likely feel outrage that your favorite books are snubbed and disgust that some books you dislike are rated highly.
One of my favorites, The Great Gatsby, took over the top spot in July, replacing One Hundred Years of Solitude. My all-time favorite novels didn’t do as well: Middlemarch came in at 25th, The Sun Also Rises at 50, The Maltese Falcon at 117, The Godfather at 310, Look Homeward, Angel at 332, and True Grit (the book Donna Tartt rereads every year) at 1,839.
If you click on the Genre tab on the home page of thegreatestbooks.org, you’ll find there are 1,450 books in the “Crime” genre. But for the most part, they aren’t what you’d typically think of as “crime novels.”
Top of the list is Crime and Punishment, which places 12th overall. Okay, it should be considered a crime novel – says so right in the title. And Dostoevsky gets inside the brain of a murderer better than anyone, outdoing even Patricia Highsmith and Richard Wright. But Crime and Punishment is largely a literary novel, a study of human evil rather than the investigation of a felony. Some of the books listed in the crime section are ludicrous, like Great Expectations and East of Eden. They’re fine novels, but hardly crime fiction.
The first book on the list I’d consider a bona fide crime book is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This book (which I’d classify as non-fiction, rather than a crime novel) is No. 72 overall. The highest ranked pure crime novel is The Long Good-Bye by Raymond Chandler at No. 84. It’s slid down the rankings since the Greatest Books website started earlier this year. It was originally pegged at No. 79.
Neither Arthur Conan Doyle nor Agatha Christie cracks the top one hundred. The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most popular Sherlock Holmes book, logs in at 124. Christie has three novels in the top five hundred: Then There Were None at 174; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd at 222 and Murder on the Orient Express at 334.
What about the leading crime novelists of today, like John Grisham, Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, Jo Nesbø, Steig Larsen, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Harlan Coben and Gillian Flynn? None made it into the top one thousand.
I remember in the mid-1980s reading a list in Esquire magazine of the leading novelists in the U.S. at the time and being surprised that Elmore Leonard joined about a dozen writers like John Updike and William Styron. It didn’t last. Leonard’s Get Shorty is No. 996 on this website, and it’s by far his most highly rated book.
Okay. I get it. Fitzgerald and Dickens are greater novelists than Grisham and Connelly. Harlan Coben ain’t Shakespeare. But I’m irritated by the constant dismissal of crime fiction as bubble-gum for the brain.
Consider The Godfather. Written when J. Edgar Hoover and others were claiming that the mafia was merely a Hollywood myth, Mario Puzo did for mafia literature what J.R.R. Tolkien did for fantasy. He wrote a wildly successful novel that all others would be judged against. He created two of the great characters in American literature, Vito and Michael Corleone. He added words such as omerta and cosa nostra, to the language.
Are there 309 books that are better than The Godfather? Not on your life.
Here’s a question to ponder: how would a similar exercise fifty years from now rate crime fiction in comparison to other genres? My bet is that the gap would be a lot narrower. We are living in a golden age of crime writers. Some are literary authors whose work involves criminals, like James McBride and Colson Whitehead. Others are just pure writers of whodunnits, like Michael Connelly and Val McDermid. There are funny writers, writers experimenting with structure and plot, writers using crime fiction to critique the justice system. There are stylists and superb police proceduralists. Crime fiction today boasts a vast array of authors pushing the envelope on the genre, and pushing it in many new and exciting directions.
And literary fiction? Well, there’s just not a lot of writers out there that really get your heart racing. Forty years ago, writers like Toni Morrison, John Updike, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez were all producing their best works. I can’t name so many strong authors today. I believe future generations will come to appreciate the strength of early- 21st-Century crime writing and it will impact future discussions of great books.
Please Join my Community and Get a Free eBook
Hi, I’m Peter Moreira, author of The Haight Mystery Series, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you want to receive my blogs regularly, please sign up for the mailing list at my website by clicking here. As well as regular blogs about Michael Connelly and other crime fiction writers, you’ll receive The Ashbury Hideaway, a free novella in ebook format. In this prequel to my Haight Mystery Series, Jimmy Spracklin’s teenage daughter runs away to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, and he has to find her before she disappears for good.
The Haight Mystery Series is set in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the late 1960s. Each book is a whodunnit with hippies. Described as ‘Gritty and Groovy” (Tampa Bay author George L. Fleming) and “Fabulous” (Pamela Callow, author of the Kate Lange series), the Haight books chronicle the investigations of SFPD Lieutenant Jimmy Spracklin into homicides in the hippie enclave. If you’re nostalgic for the 1960s, fond of San Francisco or just love great page-turners with strong characters, check out The Ashbury Hideaway. I hope you enjoy the novella enough to move on to the five novels (so far) in the series.
If you do read them, let me know what you think. I love hearing from my readers.
