Marlon James and Viet Thanh Nguyen: Why is one's work considered crime fiction and the other's not?

I recently read two novels that won big literary awards, and I thought highly of both. One of the books is very much a crime novel, the other is not, yet it was the non-crime novel that won this year's Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America.

That novel, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, I wrote:

"includes two killings of the kind that presumably would be investigated by local authorities if they happened in the real rather than a fictional California, but there is no such investigation in The Sympathizer. Nor do the protagonist's reaction to and thoughts about those crimes constitute a major component of the narrative. Significant, yes. Thematically dominant, no.

"Rather, the novel's generic affinities are from the very first sentence with the espionage novel, which has long led a comfortable co-existence with crime fiction. Still, I suspect that few readers will regard The Sympathizer as a spy story. Indeed, the subject does not come up in an interview with Nguyen included as an appendix to the Grove Press trade paperback edition of the novel. Rather, the book is a political novel, a novel of immigration, a novel about Vietnam, a novel about the United States, about the perils and exigencies of moving between the two, about the equivocal (at best) nature of revolutions, and, most important, about the illusory nature of binary opposition, whether between American and Vietnamese, European and Asian, communist and its opposite, or what have you."

Yet the MWA gave the novel an Edgar Award that the author can hang on his wall next to his 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The action of Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, on the other hand, is set in motion by a real-life crime reimagined: the 1976 assassination attempt against Bob Marley. It includes scenes of gang and drug violence in Jamaica and New York, and its story of a crime's ripple effects is something like that told in James Ellroy's A Cold Six Thousand or perhaps Don Winslow's Savages, yet James has no Edgar or Dagger Awards to hang next to the 2015 Man Booker Prize he won for A Brief History ...

I don't suppose it matters much in which category one places these two fine books, but I wonder why Nguyen's achieved purchase in the crime fiction world while James' achieved none, at least in that part of the crime fiction world that gives out awards. Did Nguyen's publishers make a conscious decision to promote the book as crime? Did James' make a conscious decision not to do so? And does it matter?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

More prizes for Peter Temple's "Truth"?

The crime-fiction world is understandably excited that Peter Temple's novel Truth has breached a literary barrier and won Australia's Miles Franklin Award.

England's Guardian newspaper wonders if the Man Booker Prize could be next to go to a crime novel.

Probably not, says John Sutherland, a former chairman of the Booker judges' panel. "The twice I've been on the Booker panel they weren't submitted," he told the newspaper. "There's a feeling that it's like putting a donkey into the Grand National."

Temple's UK publisher, Quercus, plans to submit Truth for this year's Booker, according to the article, to which Temple says: "Just to make the the Booker longlist would be a wonderful thing."

So, could Truth win? With passages like this, why not:

"One spring morning in 1970, the bridge's half-built steel frame stood in the air, it crawled with men, unmarried men, men with wives, men with wives and children, men with children they did not know, men with nothing but the job and the hard, hard hangover and then Span 10-11 failed."

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An early exchange between the protagonist, Inspector Stephen Villani, and his daughter has just a hint of the byplay between Bill James' Colin Harpur and his daughters. A tribute? Perhaps; Temple has called James "a star."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010