Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Guess Who?

How the Owner of the Greatest Mystery Bookstore Pulled the Genre Out of the Muck: “This is literature. It’s not just puzzles, it’s not just telling a nice story.”

1 comment:

Don Coffin said...

"Chandler, Hammett, and Cain all published their best novels in the 1930s..."

Chandler published one book in the 1930s...granted it was great (The Big Sleep).

I'll give him Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key).

Cain...maybe (The Postman Always Rings Twice; Serenade. Double Indemnity & Mildred Pierce were published in the 940s.) You have to put a lot of weight on Postman, though.

As a reader, I'd say that, as important as Penzler was--and is, this gives him too much credit. Ross MacDonald's appearance on page 1 of the NY Times Book Review was pre-Penzler. John MacDonald had also broken through. Just in general, "genre" literature began to emerge from the ghettos (SF...; romance took longer, I think) in the 1960s.