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Not the Usual SuspectsThree detective novels that restore pleasure to reading.

By Ron RosenbaumPosted Monday, March 2, 2009, at 1:55 PM ET

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Before The Silver Swan ensorcelled me, there was Philip Kerr's A Quiet Flame, about a Berlin homicide detective among Argentina's neo-Nazis in the 1950s. A book I liked so much—too much—that I lost the ability to separate reality from fiction and made a dreadful mistake when I sought to blog about it (more about that later). And before that, there was Year of the Dog, the second novel by Henry Chang about a detective in New York's Chinatown, particularly a tiny, seedy, infinitely complex chunk of it a few blocks below Houston Street. I'll defer to Richard Price, one of the few contemporary novelists worthy of such deferment, who describes the "uniquely urban melancholy" Chang conjures up, giving us a Chinatown with "a loving specificity ... that has rarely if ever been encountered in fiction before."

What these books have in common, of course, is that they are formally genre novels, literally detective stories (you'll recall, I know, that Pale Fire is a kind of murder mystery, too), yet they surpass both in artistry and pleasure every highly praised sophomoric attempt at literary fiction I've thrown against the wall in the past few years.

When did pleasure (and mystery) take a back seat to the empty innovation that plagues us now? I actually think that one can find a precise dividing line (not the only one but a serviceable one) in the gulf between John Barth's brilliant, hilarious, grand, mock-epic, contrarian 1960 novel of America's founding, The Sot-Weed Factor (please read it if you haven't yet, and I will forever be in your debt), and Barth's 1967 follow-up: a massive postmodern mistake of an academic novel called Giles Goat Boy, many hundreds of pages beating one stale joke to death. (The university is like the universe, a conceit that only an academic could take pleasure in.)

I actually almost flunked out of college because of the pleasure I took in The Sot-Weed Factor. I was failing a freshman physics course—"physics for poets," they called it at Yale—that was hard to flunk, and yet when I had my last chance to eke out a passing grade through special tutoring and, uh, study, I just couldn't stop reading The Sot-Weed Factor to save my soul (and me from a term at summer school). I failed the course but changed my life. I realized that self-destructive pleasure is the best there is. It makes you realize there are no limits to your love and what you'd sacrifice for it.

Or if you want another dividing line—and this will cause howls of anger and anguish—how about the one between Pynchon's first two novels, V and The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, which reads like an accumulation of transcendently brilliant riffs that seem designed to give pleasure more to the author than the reader.

Another one: The difference between Robert Coover's show-offy postmodern novel about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, The Public Burning, and E.L. Doctorow's luminous tragedy on the same subject, The Book of Daniel. Doctorow's book is more traditional in form but light-years ahead in offering tragedy's incarnation of pleasure: catharsis, the absence of exhaustion of pain.

Pleasure: It began to disappear in the days when everyone was writing second-rate imitations of Raymond Carver or—as Tom Wolfe memorably put it—novels by Iowa Writers' Workshop fellows who move to a corn belt state exurb and have five conversations with a plumber named Lud and think they've had an epiphany about the American soul that makes for the weak-tea post-Carver "mall-fiction" we had to suffer through for so long, the fiction in which depression was the true, most deeply felt literary emotion.

And, by the way, I'm not holding up Tom Wolfe as a model novelist, either, or defending his screeds. Don't try to saddle me with that rap. (God, the misapprehensions you have to fight your way through to get to making a point on this subject.) In fact the very difference between Wolfe's amazing, still-vital nonfiction (don't argue with me until you can prove you've read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and his lackluster novels further proves the point.

Which was: I can't take contemporary fiction seriously, and, what's worse, I can't even finish it. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed reading a contemporary nongenre novel, and I've even exhausted my favorite genre, the espionage thriller: How many times can you reread A Coffin for Dimitrios, the inspiration for the works of Alan Furst, without seeing how cruelly second Furst is?

It was really Philip Kerr who rescued the detective novel for me some years ago with his amazing "Berlin Noir" trilogy—about a homicide detective in the incipient homicidal hell of Berlin in the early '30s—and the two recent add-ons: The One From the Other, whose astonishing mashup of moral ambiguity and Chandler-esque pleasures I've written about, and now the forthcoming fifth one, A Quiet Flame, which is just so utterly unexpectedly spellbinding I want to put a gun to Kerr's head and force him to stop writing any other kind of book. (He's got a line of literary fiction himself.)

It also almost made me want to put a gun to my own head because of the terrible mistake I made reading the galleys of A Quiet Flame, which—notice how I'm going to (entirely unfairly) blame Kerr—had me so spellbound I lost track of the distinction between the historically real sinister "Directive 11" promulgated by Argentine anti-Semites before World War II—a ruling that refused Jews sanctuary in the country—and an even more sinister but (probably) fictional "Directive 12," which Kerr's detective Bernie Gunther discovers to his horror in Nazi-fugitive infested postwar Peronist Argentina—a South American concentration camp somewhere in the remote outback.

After posting about Kerr's "Directive 12" as though it were real, I had to apologize to him and my blog readers because Kerr was so damned skillful—and because the directive he imagines is not at all beyond contemplation. It was almost unfair of him to write so well.