Bold old voices

This week’s episode of John J Miller’s Great Books podcast covers Casino Royale. An instant must-listen, as you can probably imagine. In answer to Miller’s standard opening question, “Why is X a great book?” guest Graham Hillard replies:

“1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as 21st-century American literary fiction.”

I think it’s great for two reasons: it inaugurates one of the iconic characters in post-war literature, without dispute, and it is surprisingly excellent in its literary virtues, and by that I mean pacing, characterization, even sentence construction. I think I joked with you in an e-mail that Casino Royale would win a National Book Award if it came out today—that’s a slight exaggeration, but there really is something to the idea that 1950s British mass market fiction is written to pretty much the same standard as twenty-first-century American literary fiction. I absolutely think that if Casino Royale came out today, it would occasion massive coverage of the “bold new voice” variety.

Like the first sentences of Casino Royale, which Miller and Hillard go on to unpack, this is a solid opening. I’ve written about Bond creator Ian Fleming’s craftsmanship as a writer before, including at the basic level of sentence structure back in May.

But what struck me in this introduction was Hillard’s point about the generally high quality of mid-century British genre fiction. Having read Fleming for years and a bunch of Eric Ambler (crime and espionage thrillers) and John Wyndham (science fiction) over the last year, I had noticed this as well—author after author turning out brilliantly structured, beautifully and strongly written novels in accessible genres. What was in the water back then? After finishing Epitaph for a Spy and The Kraken Wakes this summer I set each down and considered what it must have been like, in the 1940s and 50s, to have books like these coming out regularly. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

Two things occur to me to complicate my nostalgia:

First, high literary quality in genre fiction was not new at the time. If anything, the Flemings and Amblers were carrying on the good work of the Buchans who came before. Good writing is good writing regardless of whether or not it appears in a highbrow form. Respect it wherever it appears. (If anything, I increasingly like good genre writing more because in addition to good writing the author of a thriller, for instance, has to excite the reader.)

Second, is there a form of survivorship bias at work here? If we read only the good stuff left over from a period, it’s not because no one wrote junk at the time. After all, I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. And yet…

And yet, the gap in quality between the good genre fiction of Fleming’s time and ours is, in my experience, vast. Insuperable. Whatever it was—a more demanding public, tougher editors, skilled authors willing to use their skills simply to entertain, deeper education on the part of writer and reader, a lack of pretension among both—something is missing now.