Word: serious
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...wrong money. last February, in Tonbridge, England, a gang of thugs pulled off an audacious $97 million heist of a cash storage depot. They were good enough to get into the warehouse (requiring military-style reconnaissance and intelligence), and good enough to get out with the loot (requiring serious logistical planning), but they failed when it came to Stage 3 - making the money disappear. In late June, long after the story had fallen off the front pages, four more people were arrested in relation to the case - one of them in Morocco - and another million pounds or so turned...
...your typical novelist. He had the burly look of a longshoreman; his face was meaty, like his prose style. And Mickey - that's a name to put in a cartoon, not on august hard covers. He also slipped a Mickey to the image of the serious fiction writer, showing a brisk contempt for the elevated anguish of creating literature. In just five years, between 1947 and 1952, he served up seven novels: I, the Jury; My Gun Is Quick; Vengeance Is Mine!; One Lonely Night; The Big Kill; Kiss Me, Deadly; and the non-Hammer story The Long Wait...
...Remember that even Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, though they were published by the most reputable house (Knopf) and wrote popular books that became hit movies, weren't considered the equals of "serious" novelists. They wrote genre fiction. The New Yorker critic (and novelist) Edmund Wilson could find "the boys in the back room" lacking. Then came another irony. Later generations of critics threw off their pretensions and mined the gritty glories of pulp fiction; they cogently argued that Hammett and Chandler, and Thompson and David Goodis and others, were worth cherishing (and that writers like Wilson, who's forgotten...
...Spillane at all; his novels were, arguably, post-humanist. No tastemaker admitted to enjoying the pulps, though they contained some of the most vigorous writing around. Few critics defended Spillane, even to establish their contrarian credentials by going against the genteel grain. (Spillane's one cheerleader among serious novelists was Ayn Rand, a dogmatic right-winger. That didn't help sway the establishment.) Hammer, who dominated the mass book market in the early '50s as monopolistically as Harry Potter did a half-century later, couldn't be ignored and, dammit, wouldn't be praised. He was both unavoidable and indefensible...
Politics is lamentable for many reasons: Government is seen as an industry, not a calling. Stunts win out over serious policy considerations. The media and electorate are more interested in sound-bytes than nuanced debates...