The New York crime novel ‹Crimerads

Other cities have their specialties. Los Angeles has fame. Paris? Beauty. Shanghai has trade, Toronto has diversity, San Francisco has Tech, Moscow has oligarchen, Tokyo 37 million people. They know that they are in a London novel, not only because people live in apartments and take the tube, but because class conflicts are the focus of history.

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But New York? New York has everything. Race and class, money and business and high finances, art and culture, ambitions and politics, sex, of course, greed that connects everything together, as well as what the New Yorker talk about: real estate. These are the topics that define daily life most densely populated in America, where every overcrowded subway car is a miracle of diversity, we have all thrown together, every religion, class, gender, age, economic class, every form of affinity and identification and self-expression, every body, elbow.

This is New York. And that's the New York novel. The practitioners of the 19th century like Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote New York novels of manners (what does: class), when it was. John Dos Passover Manhattan transfer expanded the class topic in 1925 to an experimental, impressionist, kaleidoscopic form, in the same year as one of the great New York crime novels ever: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The big gatsby.

In high school English lessons ,, Gatsby is not taught as a crime novel. But Jay Gatsby is a criminal, Nick Carraway is pretty much an amateur -Sleuth, Gatsby's hidden stories do the conspiracy, and the structure is a murder that has followed with a revenge. You also don't necessarily think of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man (1952) or Toni Morrison's jazz (1992) as New York crime novels, but look closely. Are you not?

A crime novel is the New York novel. Not only because in real life we ​​are always right around the corner of a crime around the corner. But because crime in fiction is the machine that offers the opportunity to transform the city's atmosphere into threats and integrate all New York topics into a driving action.

In the 1970s, New York was quite famous for a criminal city. The Daily News Paraphrased the US President with “Ford to City: Drop Dead” when the urban government fluctuated on the sidelines of bankruptcy and burned the Bronx. But even due to the power failures and graffiti and corruption and the overwhelming prevalence of dog chips, New York was still America's cultural capital and the center of the publishing world. So the authors still came to this criminal city, which began the heyday of the New York crime novel. Jay Mcinerneys Bright lights, big city (1984), New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (1985-86), Bret Easton Ellis's American psycho (1991), Don Delillo Underworld (1997) – All crimes and the impending threat to violence and death to promote stories that really deals with the interface of New York experiences.

The apotheosis of the era was Tom Wolfe's Moloch The campfire of the vanities, originally brought into the world in 1984-85 Rab In 27 installmentsPresent Then published in 1987 as an important bestseller and was published in 1990 as Hollywood debacle by Big Budget of Epic Proportions (recorded in Julie Salamon's excellent book from 1991 The sweets of the devil). Fire Sprite every New York guy, almost like a Dave Chapelle show: nobody is spared. The conspiracy of crime and fighting is profound and over the core topics, class, money, sex, greed, ambition that drives the city. Fire Let us use the Phrase Masters of the Universe to describe arrogant Wall Streeters, a kind of shadow that is more relevant today than ever.

In recent decades, the New York crime novel has blossomed both commercially and critically with spectacular books like Richard Price Lavish life (2008), Donna Tarts The gold finch (2015), Jennifer Egan Manhattan Beach (2017), James McBride Deacon King Kong (2020) and Colson Whitehead's Harlem shuffle (2021). Perhaps these do not necessarily look like crime novels on bookstore shelves, but whether something that is considered a genre is more common as a choice of marketing -it is an instruction to aim with the cover design, it is a review ecosystem for the court -if a description of the text. But don't make a mistake: these great books are all New York crime novels.

The basic topics that define New York City are of course not unique in New York City. What the city does singular is the constant presence of all these American tensions in the one place that is also the largest city of the nation, not to mention the richest city in the world – possibly in the history of human civilization – and creates a confluence with dramatic tensions about breed, class, money, art, art, ambition, politics, gender, greed and, yes, yes, yes. This is not just New York; This is America.

So take a look at all the books mentioned above. Are these great New York crime novels? Or are these great American novels? Or are these two sentences the same?

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