Orwell had a weakness for escapist fiction, for “good bad books.” Illustration by John Cuneo

When Matthew Arnold keeled over, in April, 1888, while hurrying to catch the Liverpool tram, Walt Whitman managed to contain his grief. “He will not be missed,” Whitman told a friend. Arnold reaffirmed all that was “rich, hefted, lousy, reeking with delicacy, refinement, elegance, prettiness, propriety, criticism, analysis.” He was, in short, “one of the dudes of literature.” Whitman probably figured that his own gnarly hirsuteness would save him from becoming a dude. He was wrong, and therein lies a lesson for all hardworking scribblers: stick around long enough, develop a cult following, gain the approval of one or two literary dudes (in Whitman’s case: Henry James, Ezra Pound, and F. O. Matthiessen), and you, too, can become respectable.

Of course, it’s one thing for a poet who contains multitudes to become a literary dude; it’s another for writers who deal with lawmen, criminals, private detectives, spies, aliens, ghosts, fallen heroines, and killer cars. Such writers—commercial and genre novelists—aim at delivering less rarefied pleasures. And part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better, something that, in the words of Arnold, reflects “the best that has been thought and said in this world.”

For the longest time, there was little ambiguity between literary fiction and genre fiction: one was good for you, one simply tasted good. You could either go to an amusement park or trundle off to a museum, ride a roller coaster or stroll among the Flemish Masters. Genre writers were not exactly unmindful of this. In 1901, G. K. Chesterton, the creator of the plump, priestly sleuth Father Brown, lamented, “Many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil.”

But good devils make for good company, and, in time, bookish people did begin to speak of them. In 1929, the eminent Milton scholar Marjorie Nicolson, the first female president of Phi Beta Kappa, described a dinner party rescued from the brink of dullness when the desperate hostess asked a distinguished scholar to name “the most significant book of recent years.” The great man replied, “I never can make up my mind between ‘The Bellamy Trial’ and ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.’ ” That, you can imagine, got the room buzzing.

Nicolson’s point was not that Agatha Christie is better than George Eliot but that readers who seek out mystery novels are looking to escape not from life but from literature, from the “pluperfect tenses of the psychical novel.” Nicolson was speaking on behalf of those intellectuals who, “weary unto death of introspective and psychological literature,” simply yearned for a good story. Edmund Wilson, however, didn’t buy it. He was irritated by the giddy approval of highbrows like Nicolson, and, in 1944, published an article in this magazine that contained some disparaging remarks about the mystery genre. To Wilson’s surprise, he received more passionate letters than his criticisms of the Soviet Union ever elicited—so many, in fact, that he felt compelled to revisit the case a few months later.

The result was “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?,” which dispatched the genre’s big guns with seignorial aplomb: Dorothy Sayers’s “The Nine Tailors” was “one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field”; Margery Allingham’s “Flowers for the Judge” was “completely unreadable.” Reading mysteries, Wilson concluded, “is a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking.” He admitted that John Dickson Carr had a descriptive gift and that Raymond Chandler wrote well, though he remained “a long way below Graham Greene.” Chandler wasn’t pleased. “Literature is bunk,” he retorted, propagated by “fancy boys, clever-clever darlings, stream-of-consciousness ladies and gents, and editorial novelists”—in other words, a bunch of literary dudes.

Nonetheless, it was a senior literary dude, W. H. Auden, who pointed Chandler canonward. In “The Guilty Vicarage,” his sin-soaked defense of the detective story, Auden decided that Chandler’s “powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.” Although properly gratified by Auden’s estimation, Chandler protested that he didn’t know what to make of it. He had studied the classics at the Dulwich College preparatory school, in London, and regarded himself as “just a fellow who jacked up a few pulp novelettes into book form.”

For all that, it was Chandler’s blend of stylish wit and tough-guy sentimentality that made it easier for the commercial writers who followed. If you were good—maybe not Chandler good, but good enough—you could find a booster among the literati. In 1965, Kingsley Amis compiled his “James Bond Dossier,” and six years later Eudora Welty gushed over Ross Macdonald’s “Underground Man” on the front page of the Times Book Review. In 1989, fans of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books were treated to a laudatory piece in the Book Review by the esteemed critic and biographer R. W. B. Lewis, and, more recently, the Times ran a feature on Lee Child. Indeed, scores of novelists in a variety of genres—P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, John le Carré, Donald Westlake, Charles McCarry, Henning Mankell, Dennis Lehane—routinely receive glowing writeups in major newspapers and literary venues.

The doyen of thriller writers, however, continues to be the Detroit-based novelist Elmore Leonard. Leonard began publishing in the nineteen-fifties and since then has produced at least one novel every two years. Hollywood discovered him before the book critics did (“3:10 to Yuma,” “Hombre,” and “Valdez Is Coming” were all adapted for the screen), but in short order Leonard’s cut-to-the-chase dialogue, intelligently spare narrative, tight-lipped heroes, and offbeat villains had reviewers tripping over their own superlatives. In 1995, Martin Amis dubbed him “a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers,” and who “possesses gifts—of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing—that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet.” It seems we have reached a point when Robert Graves’s words about Shakespeare can be applied to Leonard: the remarkable thing about him is that he is “really very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” Does this sound like a guilty pleasure?

Praise can be seductive, and writers who ordinarily would not reach for literary laurels may start hankering after them. But if a writer of a romance or a mystery succeeds in deepening her narrative does the guilt disengage from the pleasure, and is the pleasure any the less for it? Writers like P. D. James pride themselves on rejecting the very conventions of detective fiction that appealed to Marjorie Nicolson. In 1981, James enlisted the Times Literary Supplement to make her case: “The modern detective story has moved away from the earlier crudities and simplicities. Crime writers are as concerned as are other novelists with psychological truth and the moral ambiguities of human action.” James’s point is well taken, but for many genre practitioners there is a danger in earnestness. Nothing bogs down a pulpy tale faster than real-life feelings about real life. The weakest parts of Robert Parker’s violent but often charming Spenser novels are the soul-searching conversations between the detective and his shrink girlfriend Susan Silverman. The dialogue makes your head explode, and not in a good way.