Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker prize to crime?

Literary awards have been one of the last bastions of high culture, but in the week when the crime writer Peter Temple took Australia's top literary prize, the Miles Franklin award, Alison Flood examines whether a detective novel could ever win the Booker

Alison Flood, guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 June 2010

When the Australian crime novelist Peter Temple heard that one of his detective novels, The Broken Shore, had been longlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin award, he "thought it was a clerical error". So when his latest novel, Truth, made this year's Miles Franklin shortlist, Temple had little hope that this time Inspector Stephen Villani, the brooding head of the Victoria homicide squad, could bring off his greatest coup and go on to win Australia's most prestigious literary prize.

"I read the other shortlisted authors, on the basis you should know who the people are who are going to beat you, and I was quite confident that at least three were going to beat me," said the author, speaking from Australia. When the judges for the prize opened the envelope to read out his name, "Booker-style", on Tuesday night, he was "absolutely humbled".

Temple is the first crime novelist ever to win the Miles Franklin, setting him in a canon of former winners including Peter Carey, David Malouf and Patrick White.

"It is a very bold thing for the judges to do. They really are the custodians of Australia's oldest literary prize, they decide who should be admitted to the contemporary canon. So to admit a crime novelist, they've put their lives on the line," said Temple. "It's a fairly small panel [of previous winners] but the writers are all of quite extraordinary talent and quality ... I don't know what on earth I'm doing there."

Back on this side of the world, no crime novel has ever won the Man Booker prize, and the former chairman of the Booker judges John Sutherland isn't expecting it to happen any time soon.

"The twice I've been on the Booker panel they weren't submitted," he said. "There's a feeling that it's like putting a donkey into the Grand National."

According to Sutherland, the perception in the UK is that there are enough specialist awards for crime fiction. The barriers to genre writers are also higher. "They just don't have quite the same class system in Australia, and perhaps they don't have the same class distinctions in Australian letters," he said.

Sutherland also worries that awarding a mainstream literary prize to a work of genre fiction, particularly one which is part of a series, would devalue its reputation. "There is a dilution effect," he said. "Series have tended to inhabit the lower reaches of literature."

But according to the bestselling crime novelist Ian Rankin, attitudes towards genre fiction are slowly shifting in this country as well.
"Things are changing," Rankin said. "The old canards are that crime fiction is plot-driven, thin on character, populist: a lesser calling. But that no longer holds true. Kate Atkinson's last three novels have been crime. Ian McEwan's Saturday is a crime story. William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms is a thriller. Slowly, the barricades are tumbling. You can now study crime fiction in some universities and high schools. At least three PhDs on my own work are currently under way. A St Andrews lecturer has written a book about one of my novels. Thirty years back, 'modern literature' at St Andrews meant Milton."

The full peice at The Guardian.