To canonize, or confine?

By Rosemary Herbert

Canonize or confine to the dustbin of literary history? How do the editors decide?

Well may readers wonder how scholars decide which story/author to canonize and which to confine to the dustbin of literary history. This was an issue I dealt with in several books for Oxford University Press, including The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, for which I served as editor in chief, and the anthologies that I edited with the late Tony Hillerman, The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories and A New Omnibus of Crime. With the Companion, I had the privilege of drawing on the expertise of sixteen advisory editors. But final judgment on which stories to include in our two anthologies fell to just Tony and me. Fortunately, in Tony, I had a great resource and support in making decisions that we both took quite seriously, even while we indulged in some good laughs along the way.

Tony Hillerman is well known to readers as the author of numerous novels about Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Navajo Tribal Policemen who solved crimes at the cultural crossroads of the American Southwest. He won numerous awards for his fiction. But while his skills as an editor are less recognized, they deserve to be celebrated, too. Take it from one who edited two anthologies with him: Tony Hillerman knew his genre. He also possessed a wonderful playfulness and sense of humor.

Both of the anthologies that Tony and I edited were designed to represent developments in the literary history of crime writing. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, our goal was to illustrate the rise of detective fiction in the United States from earliest times to the close of the twentieth century. In our next book, A New Omnibus of Crime, our mission was to bring together stories representing seventy-five years of genre innovations that have occurred since Sayers published her landmark anthology, The Omnibus of Crime.

We knew it was a tall order to follow in Sayers’ footsteps, so we decided to tread carefully. We pulled together reams of short stories and, over a period of months, we pored over them earnestly in our own homes.

We were looking for stories that took steps forward from the fiction of Sayers’ day. We wanted to demonstrate how mystery writers over the last three quarters of a century allowed the love element — which had been largely shunned in Sayers’ time as a distraction from the mystery plot — to enter and enrich their stories. We sought to showcase the growth of the regional crime story by selecting some distinctly regional writings. We decided to show how some contemporary crime writers dare to leave the stain of crime on the scene instead of tidying up as thoroughly as did Sayers’ contemporaries. And of course we wanted to make sure a variety of sleuths and crime types would be found in A New Omnibus of Crime. We found stories that feature private eyes and policeman, nosey neighbors and accidental sleuths, murder in the mean streets and plots cooked up over Christmas pudding. We were just as ready to be original in our choices as we were to carefully consider stories that already stood tall in the landscape of crime and mystery writing.

Finally, we got together in Tony’s home just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Each of us had a stack of stories we liked and another stack of those that we preferred not to include in our Omnibus. We were pleased to find that our tastes were remarkably alike, not only in our choices of authors, but in our preferences for particular pieces.

Nevertheless, we decided to go through the reject piles just to be certain that we had given each story a fair shot. When we got to one story, Tony smiled and said, “This is one of the deadliest stories I have ever read! It has no entertainment value. Tell me, Rosemary, why in the world did we ever even consider this one?”

I reminded him that it did represent a development in the literary history of the genre.

“Well, than let’s confine it to the literary history!” Tony said, smiling as he threw the sheaf of papers over his shoulder.

And there that story remains, so deeply buried in the dustbin of literary history that to this day, I cannot remember its title or author. In the final analysis, while Tony and I were keen to trace the forward progress of the mystery story, we were also determined to honor its ongoing traditions. And the greatest of them all is that crime writing is by nature an entertaining genre.

Rosemary Herbert is most recently co-editor of A New Omnibus of Crime and author of the novel Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery.