Crime Fiction.

Crime fiction has become dull.

Streams of TV series' and books pounding out the same plots, has reduced crime fiction to low brow. The characters have become stale. Fed up with the drunk detective who is emotionally unattached to the world, I propose a new beginning for a beloved genre.

No longer will it be about cheap thrills for sun seekers, lazing on the beach reading the same methods over and over again. No longer will TV produce the same series just in a different state. It has become absurd. Writers joining together to churn more of the same crap. James Patterson was once a fresh crime writer. Kiss the girls and Along came a spider are excellent books. But now his novels seem reproductions of his past works. He seems to be no longer creating, but replicating.

Writers need to change the expectations of crime fiction.

Raymond Chandler, whom, in my opinion, is one of the great innovators of crime fiction. He tried to make it literary. His style was not that of a paperback, but crime fiction as art. How did we degenerate back?

Paul Auster in recent years has also dealt with the crime fiction form. In 1987, he produced a postmodernist novel called The New York Trilogy that destroyed the genres conventions. Yet, readers and writers have fallen complacent. Accepting the drivel, and not challenging new ways to produce crime fiction as ART.

Edgar Allan Poe, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Paul Auster have all taken the genre and pushed it as far as they could. It is now our chance to do the same. I am not proposing we write the grotesque to regain the public's attention. Instead, I suggest we experiment with crime fiction's form and characters. The idea is to make it fresh. To make the reader feel like this is the first crime fiction novel produced. To exceed expectations.

Crime affects society. Literature should aim to entertain, but also to teach. It needs to show society itself, without apology. Literature promotes change. We must produce literary and experimental works to revitalise crime fiction, so that it may teach society once more.