4.6.4.12 Cult, or coterie, novels.

4. 6. 4. 12 Cult, or coterie, novels.

The novel, unlike the poem, is a commercial commodity, and it lends itself less than the materials of literary magazines to that specialized appeal called coterie, intellectual or elitist. It sometimes happens that books directed at highly cultivated audiences--like Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936)--achieve a wider response, sometimes because of their daring in the exploitation of sex or obscenity, more often because of a vitality shared with more demotic fiction. The duplicated typescript or the subsidized periodical, rather than the commercially produced book, is the communication medium for the truly hermetic novel.

The novel that achieves commercial publication but whose limited appeal precludes large financial success can frequently become the object of cult adulation. In the period since World War II, especially in the United States, such cults can have large memberships. The cultists are usually students (who, in an era of mass education, form a sizable percentage of the total population of the United States), or fringes of youth sharing the student ethos, and the novels chosen for cult devotion relate to the social or philosophical needs of the readers. The fairy stories of Tolkien, The Lord of the Flies of Golding, the science fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., have, for a greater or lesser time, satisfied a hunger for myth, symbols, and heterodox ideas, to be replaced with surprising speed by other books. The George Orwell cult among the young was followed by a bitter reaction against Orwell's own alleged reactionary tendencies, and such a violent cycle of adoration and detestation is typical of literary cults. Adult cultists tend, like young ones, to be centred in universities, from which they circulate newsletters on Finnegans Wake, Anthony Powell's Music of Time sequence, and the works of Evelyn Waugh. Occasionally new public attention becomes focussed on a neglected author through his being chosen as a cult object. This happened when the novellas of Ronald Firbank, the anonymous comic novel Augustus Carp, Esq., and G. V. Desani's All About Mr. Hatterr got back into print because of the urging of minority devotees. Despite attempts to woo a larger public to read it, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano obstinately remained a cult book, while the cultists performed their office of keeping the work alive until such time as popular taste should become sufficiently enlightened to appreciate it.

4. 6. 4. 13 Detective, mystery, thriller.

The terms detective story, mystery, and thriller tend to be employed interchangeably. The detective story thrills the reader with mysterious crimes, usually of a violent nature, and puzzles his reason until their motivation and their perpetrator are, through some triumph of logic, uncovered. The detective story and mystery are in fact synonymous, but the thriller frequently purveys adventurous frissons without mysteries, like the spy stories of Ian Fleming, for example, but not like the spy stories of Len Deighton, which have a bracing element of mystery and detection. The detective novel began as a respectable branch of literature with works like Poe's " Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Dickens' unfinished Edwin Drood (1870), and Wilkie Collins' Moonstone (1868) and Woman in White (1860). With the coming of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, at the beginning of the 20th century, the form became a kind of infraliterary subspecies, despite the intellectual brilliance of Holmes's detective work and the high literacy of Doyle's writing. Literary men like G. K. Chesterton practiced the form on the margin, and dons read thrillers furtively or composed them pseudonymously (e. g., J. I. M. Stewart, reader in English literature at Oxford, wrote as " Michael Innes" ). Even the British poet laureate, C. Day Lewis, subsidized his verse through writing detective novels as " Nicholas Blake. " Dorothy L. Sayers, another Oxford scholar, appeared to atone for a highly successful career as a mystery writer by turning to religious drama and the translating of Dante, as well as by making her last mystery novel--Gaudy Night (1935)--a highly literary, even pedantic, confection.

Such practitioners as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, to say nothing of the highly commercial Edgar Wallace and Mickey Spillane, have given much pleasure and offended only the most exalted literary canons. The fearless and intelligent amateur detective, or private investigator, or police officer has become a typical hero of the modern age. And those qualities that good mystery or thriller writing calls for are not to be despised, since they include economy, skillful sustention of suspense, and very artful plotting.

The mystery novel was superseded in popularity by the novel of espionage, which achieved a large vogue with the James Bond series of Ian Fleming. Something of its spirit, if not its sadism and eroticism, had already appeared in books like John Buchan's Thirty-nine Steps and the " entertainments" of Graham Greene, as well as in the admirable novels of intrigue written by Eric Ambler. Fleming had numerous imitators, as well as a more than worthy successor in Len Deighton. The novels of John Le Carré found a wide audience despite their emphasis on the less glamorous, often even squalid aspects of international espionage; his works include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Smiley's People (1980). (see also spy story)