Should authors stick to only writing characters who fit their own demographic categories? No, obviously not. That would be stupid. And yet some have landed in hot water because they haven't done this.
So it's heartening to see author Zac Bissonnette give props to Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware series, which also includes as a prominent character Milo Sturgis, a gay LAPD detective, despite Kellerman not being gay. Kellerman, who I confess to not having read, shows a wise attitude toward artistic practice in the interview.
Not that I agree with everything Bissonnette writes here. He also states that, "The generation of crime writers who preceded Kellerman—Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, and too many pulp novelists to name—often wrote books rife with misogyny and casual racism, to the point where they can be hard for a modern reader to get through." That would seem to indicate that I am not a modern reader. Which would explain a lot, now that I think of it.
2 comments:
What's funny about the people protesting the book is the likelihood very few of them read it before opinionating about the author using stereotypes. How steriotypical..
I remember reading 'The Devil's Waltz' by Jonathan Kellerman early on in our stay in Portland. It would appear it never occurred to me to be shocked or surprised that his character Milo Sturgis was gay. I don't think I was ever drawn to reading more of his novels either. At the time I'd been reading Reginald Hill's 'Dalziel and Pasco' novels and one of the main characters in those books was Detective Sergeant Wield - a dour craggy faced Scot who was good investigator and secretly gay. When he tries to inform Dalziel, Dalziel reveals he knew since his first day in CID, and that he wasn't fooling anyone.
The fact that we enjoy the works of earlier crime writers who were sometimes prone to casual racism and misogeny is simply to enjoy the breadth of our culture. The protestors would force us to read nothing other than the 'woke' products of the past five years or so. As Jer just said, 'It's a quick and easy way to get rid of the competition'.
I might not have thought of that if you hadn't said it, but you're absolutely right. Lazy assumptions are at the root of stereotypes. Makes you wonder what they really want.
While I haven't read Kellerman, I have read at least one Dalziel and Pasco book. (Enough to remember that Dalziel is pronounced "Duh-yeel" or something like that.) I had forgotten DS Wield but it's starting to come back now. Dalziel is a good enough detective to be one of the first to figure it out, and also proud enough of the fact to bring it up. Given Britain's reputation for politeness and its position until recently within progressive-aligned Western Europe, it's interesting how many of these old fashioned, politically incorrect coppers show up in books and TV. Inspector Frost and Gene Hunt are two other clear cases.
Also a good point about getting rid of the competition. But you need competition. When you just shut out everything from the past that lets you off the hook as far as creating things with beauty and meaning. Also, you're disadvantaged at understanding the rest of the world. A black writer named Wilfred Reilly has said that "There's a whole continent full of Black Conservatives."
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