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!

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.