A thriller stirs this Man Booker long list

Every summer, the announcement of the Man Booker Prize long list kicks off a conversation that lasts until October, when a winner is named. So it's no shock that this year's slate, announced Tuesday, has done exactly that. What is surprising is the presence of one name among the 13 long-listed authors: Tom Rob Smith, a 29-year-old London screenwriter who made a critical and commercial splash earlier this year with his debut thriller, "Child 44."

That's right: The prize known for its literary acumen has put a thriller on the long list for the first time since such lists were made public and official in 2001. Needless to say, it's a development some book people find problematic.

"I cannot respect a judging committee that decides to pick a book like 'Child 44,' a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that," fumed Canongate publisher Jamie Byng on the Booker Prize message forum. One suspects that if Edmund Wilson -- who dismissed genre fiction in his 1945 New Yorker essay "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" -- could climb out of his grave to protest and then die again, he would.

And yet, if "Child 44" -- a serial killer novel that takes place in the last years of Stalin's Russia -- appears at first glance to be a brash upstart, a closer look suggests that its inclusion might not be so unlikely after all. Indeed, this is the most recent example of the blurring of the line between crime fiction and literature, which raises hope that the so-called genre wars are lurching toward, if not an end, then at least a tentative cease-fire.

The notion of "genre wars" goes back to Wilson, who decried the entire field of detective fiction based on selective reading of Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. Genre enthusiasts recoiled.

In the years since, this pattern has been repeated. Consider the angry letters written in response to Ben Yagoda's 2004 Salon essay "The Case of the Overrated Mystery Novel," which used a handful of award-winning crime novels to frame a negative argument about the genre.

Yagoda's essay, with its emphasis on prize recipients, unwittingly highlights a peculiar irony: The most prestigious genre award in America, the Edgar, has begun skewing more toward the literary. Both John Banville, who writes crime fiction as Benjamin Black, and Michael Chabon, long a champion of blending genre tropes with aesthetic ambition, were among this year's best-novel finalists.