Here's another long post for you to wade through, while you're waiting
for the printer to finish shredding your last 5 pages:

Owen Parry, author of a really enjoyable historical mystery series,
received the International Association of Crime Writers' 2003 Hammett
Prize.  This is his acceptance speech, in which he makes some rather
pointed comments about what constitutes "literary" writing -- and
success.  I'd be interested to hear your comments.  (BTW, when you do
reply, just send us your cogent thoughts, and not the text of the address.)
Scribite!
kent
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Although we may be uncomfortable admitting it, we all like recognition.
Certainly, I'm very grateful for, and honored by, your generosity in
granting the latest Hammett Award to Honor's Kingdom. But I've also been
writing and publishing long enough, both in my preferred guise as Owen
Parry and under my birth name, Ralph Peters, to realize that, in the
end, the receipt of any award involves a great deal of luck.

Of course, talent is involved--I hope so, anyway. Even more important,
writing well requires a great deal of hard work. But, at the end of the
day, selling books and winning awards is also a matter of luck. It was
an honor simply to be nominated in the company of the other books and
authors considered this year, any of which might have won. Who were the
judges this year, and what are their personal tastes? That certainly
matters. Was Judge Y in a bad mood when he or she read Book X? Was
another book, better than any of this year's nominees, simply
overlooked? Or is the best book of all still tucked in someone's desk
drawer because it just "wasn't right" for the publisher's list when it
was submitted?

I'm not making a phony, everybody-deserves-a-prize statement to please
an audience. I'm simply trying to recognize how complex all of this is;
to say that we, as writers, absolutely must take our work seriously, but
need to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. It's about the writing,
not the writer, about the book, not the author.

The ability to write even a middling novel is a great gift. No matter
how we have labored to develop our skills, no matter how many
disappointments we have faced--or how many successes we have
achieved--all of those privileged to tell tales on the page have been
given a gift. And we must never claim too much personal credit for any
gift we have been given. On the contrary, we must strive, in our work
and in our lives, to be worthy of even the slightest gifts.

I'm just delighted to hold this award in my hand--but I recognize that
any number of members of this audience may be more talented and more
deserving than I am.

That said, you gave it to me, and I'm going to keep it!

  <>        If I may take just a few more moments of your time, I would
like to raise a subject that may be painful to some ears.

Time and again, I've been asked, by well-meaning people, "Why do you
write that kind of book?" The implication is that, since I seem capable
of writing a clear sentence now and then, I'm wasting my talent and my
time writing mysteries or novels of suspense. I find the question
insulting--as you would--but I just let it go by with a smile and a
noncommittal remark.

What, I wonder, do they think I should write? Let's be honest: most of
what passes for "serious" fiction these days is simply dreadful. (On the
other hand, in a year of surprises, the New York Times may win the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year). Do we really need yet another
long-winded, self-pitying, excruciatingly dull and self-important novel
about an author's (thinly-disguised) dysfunctional family and troubled
childhood?

I think not.

"Serious" fiction is in trouble because it's like Alice, getting smaller
and smaller and smaller in its themes. Soon, we'll have an
eight-hundred-page novel about a thirteen-year-old's pimple. And I don't
want to read it.

In literature, small isn't always beautiful. Sometimes it's just small.

The novel of suburban-adolescent suffering? Get over it. At one point or
another, everybody's childhood sucked. Who cares about the author's
lightly fictionalized miseries in seventh grade? We all had terminal
dandruff or a lonely summer vacation at one time or another. That isn't
real suffering. It's what those who have led privileged, sheltered lives
imagine suffering to be.

I've been out in the great wide world, from refugee camps to the
wreckage of other people's wars. Those things matter. AIDS, genocide,
massacre, terrorism, racial and ethnic hatred, the plague of corruption
that robs hundreds of millions of human beings of a meaningful future.
That's what matters. Not that daddy was rude to us over dinner.

Isn't anybody writing about big issues today?

In fact, a good number of writers are doing so. They're writing about
matters of life and death, of deep passions, of fear--and joy--and about
human beings under extreme stress, the stuff of life at its utmost.

They're mystery writers. And crime writers. And the authors of novels of
suspense.

James Ellroy' s American Tabloid, published several years ago, is more
convincing as "serious" literature than anything Phillip Roth or Joyce
Carol Oates ever wrote. That was a big, daring, convincing, wonderful
book. And that's just one example. But literary criticism has become a
closed world for medieval theologians, of the campus, by the campus and
for the campus. If a novel has even a hint of real human drama, it won't
pass critical muster.

And, by the way, what's wrong with having fun when we read? What's wrong
with a whacking-good story well told? I'll take Val McDermid's A Place
of Execution, a book that truly explores the dark places of the heart,
over Jonathan Franzen's over-hyped, over-blown and self-adoring The
Corrections any day. I don't care about stubbed toes. I care about
broken lives, broken hearts, and this broken world we all must
constantly mend. That's what I write about. That's what you write about.
And that's what I want to read about. It strikes me that Oedipus Rex was
a murder mystery, while Electra and Medea were the original crime
stories. Hamlet wasn't just a whodunnit, but an is-he-going-to-do-it'?
And while we're on the subject of the classics and what makes
literature, it seems to me that the Book of Genesis said pretty much all
that needed to be said about dysfunctional families--and anything
Genesis missed was covered by Dickens and Faulkner.

But show me a death, and I'll spin you a tale filled with the stuff of life.

Friends and colleagues, even though most of the books you write will be
relegated to the mystery/suspense shelves in the apartheid society of
contemporary publishing and book-selling, you should be in no doubt.
 You are writing of things that matter. And you matter, every one of you.

I began by talking about luck. I served in the military for twenty-two
years, and I certainly saw how luck matters. Not every one of you will
be lucky. Not everyone gets a prize. Not all of your talents or labors
will be recognized. But I want you to know that this year's fortunate
recipient of the Hammett Award recognizes each and every one of you.

Thank you.