Donkey in a Horse Race?

When crime fictionist Peter Temple’s 2005 novel, The Broken Shore, was longlisted for Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, he thought someone had made a mistake. So when his current novel, Truth, actually won the Miles Franklin Award last week, he told The Guardian that he was “absolutely humbled.” From The Guardian:

Temple is the first crime novelist ever to win the Miles Franklin, setting him in a canon of former winners including Peter Carey, David Malouf and Patrick White.

“It is a very bold thing for the judges to do. They really are the custodians of Australia's oldest literary prize, they decide who should be admitted to the contemporary canon. So to admit a crime novelist, they've put their lives on the line,” said Temple. “It’s a fairly small panel [of previous winners] but the writers are all of quite extraordinary talent and quality ... I don’t know what on earth I'm doing there.”

This surprise victory has people on both sides of the pond talking. And not all of what they’re saying is good. One former Man Booker Prize chairman told The Guardian that he isn't expecting a work of crime fiction to win the Man Booker in the foreseeable future.

Back on this side of the world, no crime novel has ever won the Man Booker prize, and the former chairman of the Booker judges John Sutherland isn’t expecting it to happen any time soon.

“The twice I’ve been on the Booker panel they weren’t submitted,” he said. “There’s a feeling that it’s like putting a donkey into the Grand National.”

According to Sutherland, the perception in the UK is that there are enough specialist awards for crime fiction. The barriers to genre writers are also higher. “They just don’t have quite the same class system in Australia, and perhaps they don’t have the same class distinctions in Australian letters,” he said.

Sutherland also worries that awarding a mainstream literary prize to a work of genre fiction, particularly one which is part of a series, would devalue its reputation. “There is a dilution effect,” he said. “Series have tended to inhabit the lower reaches of literature.”

Scottish novelist Ian Rankin, however, says change may well be afoot:

“The old canards are that crime fiction is plot-driven, thin on character, populist: a lesser calling. But that no longer holds true. Kate Atkinson’s last three novels have been crime. Ian McEwan’s Saturday is a crime story. William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms is a thriller. Slowly, the barricades are tumbling. You can now study crime fiction in some universities and high schools. At least three Ph.D.s on my own work are currently under way. A St. Andrews lecturer has written a book about one of my novels. Thirty years back, ‘modern literature’ at St. Andrews meant Milton.”

Meanwhile, one of the Miles Franklin judges tries to define the distinction between Great Literature and the predominance of crime fiction:

“Most crime novels that I have read (and I read one a week, often more) will never win the Miles Franklin or any other ‘literary’ prize because they do not work language hard enough, and they do not think originally and with sufficient depth and imagination,” she said. “They may gratify but they do not surprise the way great literature does.

“In the case of Peter Temple’s Truth, the divide was so comprehensively crossed that we did not think much about the conventions of crime fiction except to note that Temple was able to observe them rather as a poet observes the 14-line convention of the sonnet or a musician the sonata form: as a useful disciplinary structure from which to expand, bend or depart.”

The author of Christine Falls and The Silver Swan concurs:

John Banville, who won the Booker for his novel The Sea, and who writes crime fiction as Benjamin Black, was absolutely in agreement, saying that “there is only one distinction, and that is between good writing and writing which is ... not good”.

The Guardian piece is lengthy and it’s here.

Temple Takes the Franklin

As Melbourne’s Herald Sun reported earlier today, Australian crime novelist Peter Temple “has won the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s premier literary prize.” The tabloid adds that “Temple’s crime fiction book, Truth, also makes history for being the first work of genre fiction to win the award, which was established in 1957.”

(Hat tip to Detectives Beyond Borders.)

Cashin in on New Acclaim

Hey, it’s not like Australian novelist Peter Temple really needs any more publicity, having already picked up his fifth Ned Kelly Award and won this year’s Duncan Lawrie Dagger for his novel The Broken Shore. Yet Bob Cornwell provides him with excellent exposure in a new interview at the Tangled Web site. My favorite responses are those that show Temple’s idiosyncratic approach to writing.

On the annoyance of deadlines: “I’m deadline-driven so I usually have to wait until someone threatens me to get on with it. And I’m endlessly tinkering. So I can never say I’m halfway. I’m not halfway, I’m halfway going back to have another stab at it. And [The Broken Shore] took exceptionally long because I was losing interest, in writing generally and existence as such, and I put it away. It dragged on and on and on and eventually my publisher rang me: ‘we need a publication date for this thing.’ So then I put my back into it. But at that point I’d been at it so long that I had no opinion left of it at all.”

On turning one-off protagonists into series leads: “It’s a form of imprisonment, a form of slavery. You shackle yourself to these people. I wrote Bad Debts, the first Jack Irish, with no intentions of writing a series. I thought it would be nice to write a book. I had a two-book contract and [HarperCollins] said, when’s the next Jack book coming out. I said, it’s not a Jack book, I’m writing something else. We’d never discussed the second book. They said hang on, you can’t write something else. So we had a polite disagreement and eventually I prevailed. So I wrote An Iron Rose, and then I wrote Black Tide, Jack No.2, and then I wrote another standalone, Shooting Star. That said, I became more attached to [Joe] Cashin [the protagonist in The Broken Shore] than my other standalone characters. But also it began to dawn on me that because I had left so many threads dangling, there was the possibility to go on. But I didn’t want to go on with Joe. Readers can bear just so much pain ...”

On why he writes crime novels: “I still don’t know how people settle down to write a literary novel. I would always drift towards something dramatic quite soon. I’ve always liked crime, and I’ve always been very critical of crime. A lot of it is very sloppy, very badly written. I liked the Americans, a lot of British writers. But I always thought: I could do that. And if I bring my editing skills to bear, I could do that better. I didn’t really choose crime, that was always what I was going to do.”

On the concept of outlining stories first: “Couldn’t bear it, that’s writing by numbers. If I was capable of sketching a plot out on a white board, I’d take the whole board down and send it the publishers and get someone else to write it.”

Temple adds that his next novel, due out from Quercus in 2008, will be called Truth, and will feature Inspector Villani, Cashin’s superior from The Broken Shore.

You will find all of Cornwell’s interview here.

READ MORE: “The Languid Throwing of a Line,” by Jenny Davidson (Light Reading).

This Is Becoming a Regular Habit

Australian crime novelist Peter Temple might just have to invest in some more bookcases, should he continue to collect prizes for his writing. Last evening, he snapped up his fifth Ned Kelly Award, bestowed upon him by the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia in honor of his 2005 novel, The Broken Shore. This marks the Ballarat, Victoria, author’s fourth Kelly victory in the Best Crime Novel category (his previous book, White Dog, scored that same award); in addition, Bad Debts, the first entry in Temple’s series featuring solicitor-cum-sleuth Jack Irish, picked up one of two Best First Crime Novel commendations given in 1997.

Temple wasn’t the only one celebrating after the Ned Kelly presentations, which were made during this year’s annual Age Melbourne Writers’ Festival. The Broken Shore, in fact, shared the Best Novel win with Crook as Rookwood, by Chris Nyst, a Gold Coast lawyer turned author.

Here’s the full shortlist of Ned Kelly nominees and winners for 2006:

Best Novel (tie): The Broken Shore, by Peter Temple (Text Publishing), and Crook as Rookwood, by Chris Nyst (HarperCollins)

Also nominated: Rendezvous at Kamakura Inn, by Marshall Browne (Random House); Saving Billy, by Peter Corris (Allen & Unwin); Rubdown, by Leigh Redhead (Allen & Unwin); and Five Oranges, by Graham Reilly (Hachette Livre)

Best First Novel: Out of Silence: A Story of Love, Betrayal, Politics and Murder, by Wendy James (Random House)

Also nominated: Head Shot, by Jarad Henry (Thompson Walker); and Dead Set, by Kel Robertson (Text Publishing)

Best True Crime: Packing Death, by Lachlan McCulloch (Sly Ink)

Also nominated: You’ll Never Take Me Alive, by Nick Bleszynski (Random House); In Your Face, by Rochelle Jackson (ABC Books); Norfolk: Island of Secrets, by Tim Latham (Allen & Unwin); and And Then the Darkness, by Sue Williams (ABC Books)

Lifetime Achievement Award: Andrew Rule and John Silvester

(The original, long list of Ned nominees can be found here.)

More Crime Across the Pond

Australian crime writer Peter Temple has a new novel out this month, a standalone called The Broken Shore. It’s the story of a homicide detective, Joe Cashin, who escapes city living to become the sole cop in his small hometown, only to have his peace upset quickly by an attack on a prominent local--a crime perhaps perpetrated by members of the area’s Aboriginal community, and sure to unearth the hamlet’s hidden past.

What’s notable here, though, isn’t simply that Temple fans have more to read, but that The Broken Shore comes from a new UK crime-fiction publisher, Quercus. I hadn’t heard much about Quercus, but Ali Karim provides some background in a short feature for Shots. It seems that Quercus was founded by “four ex-staff members from the Orion Publishing Group”--a prominent British house--“including the original founder of Orion, Anthony Cheetham.” The ubiquitous Otto Penzler, he of The Mysterious Bookshop fame, has signed on to help Quercus put together its American mystery list. One of the forthcoming works credited to Penzler’s involvement is Pulp Fiction: The Crimefighters, an anthology of pulp magazine stories from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, including work from Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler, Frederick Nebel, Paul Cain, and Norbert Davis.

Quercus’ Web site says that its crime-fiction list is to be published as a joint venture with Harcourt, a U.S. house. Yet while several of the Quercus titles, such as Thomas H. Cook’s Red Leaves (new in paperback) and Andrew Klavan’s Damnation Street (the third entry in his Weiss and Bishop series, due out in September), are also appearing under the Harcourt imprint, neither The Broken Shore nor Pulp Fiction seems so far to have a publication date in the States.

UPDATE: Peter Temple wrote to tell me that, in fact, U.S. publisher “Farrar, Straus & Giroux have bought The Broken Shore. Publication is in your spring next year. I’m delighted to be published by such a distinguished house (and by such a distinguished and charming publisher, Jonathan Galassi).”