Criminally good: How crime fiction crept up on the Booker longlist

Over the course of its 54-year history, the Booker Prize has become the focus of strong opinions - and opinions breed criticism. One of the most consistent reproaches aimed at the prize is that no crime novel has ever won. The inference being that the judges - more than 240 of them over the years - have consistently ignored the most popular form of fiction for reasons of snobbery and literary elitism, as if wilfully determined to keep innumerable readers at arm’s length. The prize, the complaint went, was for what used to be called literary fiction only.

While that term has faded from common usage as the understanding has spread that definitions and genres are too often restrictive or ill-defined and that novels are multifarious things that can traverse many areas at once, the adherents of crime writing still regularly air their grievance. They point to the fact that such significant authors as P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Mark Billingham, Mo Hayder, Robert Galbraith and Mick Herron have never been longlisted. Nor, since the prize was opened up to writers from around the world in 2014, have any of the big-name Americans, the likes of Jeffery Deaver and James Patterson. 

In 2018, Snap by Belinda Bauer was longlisted for the Booker. The fact that Bauer, a winner of both the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award and the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award, had been nominated for what seemed to be an orthodox crime novel – about a boy who sets out to discover his mother’s murderer – was seen as highly unusual. Bauer herself recalled getting ‘some flak on Twitter… “How dare Belinda Bauer think she can be on this longlist?” That sort of thing.’ 

Along the way, one of the great names in crime writing, Ruth Rendell, who also wrote as Barbara Vine, was longlisted with A Guilty Thing Surprised for the 2010 Lost Man Booker Prize – an award to correct a chronological quirk when the prize organisation changed and several likely contenders became inadmissible. Rendell had by then already shown that she was no bearer of grudges and agreed to serve as a Booker Prize judge in 1995. Indeed, the grandest dames of British crime fiction seem to have an equable core: P.D. James was chair of the 1987 judges and Val McDermid was a judge in 2018. 

One writer, whose works combine crime, espionage and psychological thriller, took unusual steps to inure himself to the possibility of prize rejection. John le Carré famously instructed his publishers not to submit him for literary prizes, including the Booker Prize. With novels such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy of 1974 (the prize was awarded that year to two winner, Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton) and A Perfect Spy (the 1986 Booker Prize went to Kingsley Amis) he would surely have been a contender. In 2011, the judges of the International Booker Prize, then an award for a body or work rather than a single book, thought they had found a way around his injunction and put him on their shortlist. Le Carré immediately responded that while he was enormously flattered: ‘I do not compete for literary prizes and have therefore asked for my name to be withdrawn’. 

What the 2011 IBP judges, and all the others who chose books with a strong element of criminality to them, have tacitly acknowledged it that the old genres of fiction have long been infinitely more fluid than the shelves of bookshops like to suggest. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall was certainly an exercise in historical fiction, except not within the narrow parameters of the category as it was once understood; the same applies to the magical realism of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo or the dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, or any number of Booker Prize nominated books that co-opt and adapt different literary traditions.
 

The judging process, however, is not a usual reading one. Each submitted book is read at least once to come up with a longlist, those 12 or 13 books are read a second time to choose a shortlist, and those six books are read at least once more before winner is chosen. Not many books can stand three readings in a matter of months without their merits losing their lustre. Nor is it humanly possible for the judges to recapture that sense of surprise and satisfaction when all the strands of a good crime novel come together and the theft or murder – or whatever the act of lawbreaking – is solved. Subsequent readings will always lack that frisson and the suspense can never be as suspenseful again. Books with a crime as their main subject put themselves at a disadvantage. 

Nor have authors themselves always been helpful in removing the barriers that have kept crime fiction at a slight distance. Graham Greene divided his fiction into his ‘entertainments’ (thrillers such as Stamboul Train and Our Man in Havana) and the ‘novels’ (such as The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair) that he thought would be his real legacy. John Banville has followed suit and claimed furthermore that he writes his crime novels both more quickly than his other works and that he regards them as ‘cheap fiction’. But then again, as a novelist, perhaps he is just toying with anyone who investigates his motives. 

What is clear, however, is that the Booker has a both a long criminal past and absolutely no desire to reform. Indeed, it looks forward to a murderous future, too.