A character in Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel Swag devises and swears by “ten rules for success and happiness.” He carries them on his person, scrawled “in blue ink on ten different cocktail napkins from the Club Bouzouki, the Lafayette Bar, Edjo’s, and a place called The Lindell AC.” This budding Dale Carnegie is keen on success and happiness in a very specific context: armed robbery. Is his system foolproof? We wouldn’t have much of a story if it were. We sure as hell wouldn’t have a Leonard novel, with poor choices and their nasty results piling up faster than a Detroit snowfall.
Twenty-five years after Swag’s publication, and perhaps in homage to that book, Leonard offered 10 rules of his own—for writing, that is, not knocking over liquor stores—to the New York Times. Most were standard fare about avoiding adverbs and exclamation points, but the final rule is interesting: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Makes sense, but it also raises the question: Who skips ahead? Most grown-up readers either slog through a book’s slower sections, like the sewer history in Les Misérables, or take their impatience or boredom as a cue to read something else.
Who skips ahead? Kids do.
They do this, I suspect, in two situations. One is when they are tasked with reading a grown-up book that they find utterly unendurable. I recall the anguish with which my high school self read Ethan Frome before having the bright idea that I could still pass the quiz if I just read every third page. (It didn’t work.) The other situation is when kids are reading for plot in a book whose language is not captivating enough to keep their eyes from dancing ahead over tone-deaf dialogue, adverbs proliferating like some invasive species, and long passages of unnecessary description.
You know what I mean: a young adult (YA) novel.
I have no desire to enter the perennial and presumably click-driven debate over whether adults should read YA. Adults should read whatever they want, whether that means YA or Dummies manuals or Tijuana Bibles or even Thomas L. Friedman. But kids are a different story. The literature they are exposed to will influence not only their adult reading habits but their personalities and inner lives. Today’s parents are likely correct to assume that little Jason or Chloe will not be taught to love reading by Ethan Frome. But there is plenty on the spectrum between Edith Wharton and Divergent, and it is going unnoticed.
Crime fiction—noir, detective novels, police procedurals, and madcap adventures in the Carl Hiaasen vein—may be the perfect thing to whet a young person’s appetite for reading. At first glance, it is an odd candidate for this task: Isn’t it violent, frightening, and perhaps even a corrupting influence? Isn’t it laced with profanity and, in some cases, sexually explicit?
Yes, but the same is true of so much of the music, television, film, and even network news that parents are helpless to keep from their children. The same is true, for that matter, of many YA novels with far less literary merit than the best crime writing.
Parents have always fretted about the moral content of what their kids read. Andrew Levy’s Huck Finn’s America (2014) details the 19th-century panic over dime novels about pirates and banditry. David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague (2008) details the furor over horror comic books in the 1950s. However one is inclined to regard the sensitivities of those eras, the fact remains that their scandalous productions are seldom revered as art. Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Elmore Leonard have, by contrast, all been enshrined in the Library of America.
These men wrote violent, lurid trash, yet they are now as canonical as Irving, Hawthorne, and Twain. And you can give said trash to your kids without a pang of conscience, knowing that they will encounter in it something of the American literary tradition. That is not, on its own, reason enough to choose crime fiction over either classic literature or YA, and a balanced diet should probably include all of the above. Still, crime fiction combines the best of both the classics and modern YA, while adding some nourishing ingredients of its own.
The best crime writing is excellent prose at the sentence level, and while it may not be up to the standard of a Melville or Twain (what is?), at least it handily surpasses the best-written YA. The classic opening line of James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss (1978), a book Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Bookshop and the Mysterious Press considers the ne plus ultra of detective stories, was quoted in several of Crumley’s obituaries:
Few novelists in the Western canon have written better or more evocative dialogue than George V. Higgins in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970): His grim characters never sound like anyone you know, but you know they must be out there somewhere. At the same time, most crime fiction, like YA, is aggressively, unapologetically plot-driven, with nothing to skip, making it ideal for those with Disney Channel attention spans. And needless to say, the sex and violence that might make crime fiction a tough sell for parents make it anything but for kids, who crave a taste of the forbidden.
Crime fiction presents not only the forbidden but also the merely grown-up. It affords an entrée into the adult world. Its protagonists are not vampires, wizards, or futuristic reality-show contestants but real people with real jobs. Along with private eyes, one finds in the pages of crime literature insurance agents (James M. Cain), process servers and bail bondsmen (Elmore Leonard), profilers and forensic scientists (Thomas Harris), park rangers (Nevada Barr), military policemen (Lee Child), and undercover cops (Matt Burgess). At a time when children are led to believe that they can get rich off an app or a pop single, such exposure to hard, dangerous, selfless work is invaluable.
Crime writing is, by definition, travel writing—and sometimes time-travel writing—as well. The best crime writers mark their territory and then bring it to life. Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy can take you to California; James Crumley to Montana; Elmore Leonard to Detroit; James Lee Burke to Louisiana; Charles Willeford and Carl Hiaasen to Florida; Daniel Woodrell to the Ozarks; Dennis Lehane to Boston; and Richard Price to New York City. Get your kids a library card, and they will know their country and its underbelly—and develop a sense of empathy and curiosity—long before the time comes for a college tour.
By empathy and curiosity, I do not mean gullibility. Crime writers rarely glamorize crime and violence the way television and movies do. They do not present bad guys who are always victims of society and circumstance. Often they fulfill a scared-straight function, showing how one decision born of greed or impatience can send a life into a tailspin of cascading failure. The “ten rules” in Leonard’s Swag are applied selectively, as a teenager would apply them: The thing most likely to go wrong is always brushed aside with a flourish of wishful thinking. This juvenile sense of Teflon untouchability, this inability to know who or what to trust, is what dooms the born loser of a crime novel.
I didn’t read my first crime novel (Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest) until college, where I shared my appreciation for the Continental Op with a friend whose brother worked in private investigation. I wish my teachers had given it to me sooner. It taught me to demand a story from everything that I read. It showed me a moral universe both more ambiguous and more exacting than anything I had hitherto encountered. It taught me that, notwithstanding man’s fallen nature, good and evil are not primitive myths.
If kids today need to be tricked and conned into reading something worthwhile, something as morally instructive and beautifully written as it is entertaining, then these bloody, crazy books ought to enjoy pride of place in every school library in America.
Stefan Beck writes about fiction for the New Criterion and elsewhere.
