The US edition of one of my novels carried the strap line ‘A novel of crime’. At the time I was bewildered by this phrasing, a strange, strangulated cluster of words, sounding like a bad translation from the German. Now that I am older and more aware of the politics around crime writing, it makes perfect sense. The publisher, a small eclectic imprint, was trying to communicate to book sellers and readers alike that it was not just crime fiction, this was literary crime fiction.

The publishers meant well: they proudly drew my attention to the cover line as if they were complimenting me. It is more than just crime fiction, they said, better.

But it wasn’t.

Putting a Stetson on a cat doesn’t make it a cowboy. It still skulks like a cat, scans the horizon for vulnerable smaller animals to murder, still has feline DNA. On a good day, my books move like crime fiction, are constructed with the same undeniable basic material, hunt for the same juicy mouthfuls.

The high art/low art distinction worries publishers only a little though: crime fiction sells like no other genre. This year, for the first time, British libraries reported crime fiction as having over taken romance as the most borrowed genre. Sales for successful writers can be astronomical, as are advances. Martin Amis has been answering questions about his half a million advance for years when seriously successful crime writers with a good track record can easily command a million. The promotional value of movie tie-ins and the natural narrative affinity of Hollywood or television and crime fiction is never forgotten. Our lowly status troubles writers a little more and readers a lot.

When literary writers stray into the crime realm their crime novel is never going to be their seminal work. Graham Greene regarded his crime novels as ‘entertainments’ rather than serious fiction and a huge number of people use pseudonyms for their crime jaunts: Julian Barnes, for example, wrote crime as Dan Kavanagh.

Our low status is constantly under attack from fans, reviewers, crime writers, and publishers, viz the strap line on my book. Reviewers who love a book or writer often make the claim that crime writing is just as valid as literary novels now. Worse yet, they may claim that their favoured writer has ‘transcended the genre’, a polite way of saying they’re not just churning out pap like the rest of us.

Implied in this argument is an assumption that there are high art books. In this category are literary fiction, historical fiction, science fiction as long as it was written a long time ago, and more recently biography, which used to be treated like a kiss and tell article in a vulgar newspaper but more recently has been accepted as worthy.

This high art/low art distinction has been examined ceaselessly over the last thirty years and roundly exposed as little more than a class distinction. Opera is not per se better than musical theatre, it is just enjoyed by a different demographic. Classical music does not tower over pop in any value sense; it simply has a longer history and a different audience.

Control of the press and reviews by an Oxbridge educated artistic elite is not over by any means but is being compromised by the number of outlets and social mobility. The real distinction should be between good work and bad work. There are terrible operas and great crime novels, ghastly literary fiction and great pop songs. Anyway, classification of work as crime is usually a marketing department choice. If a writer wrote a string of literary novels and one crime novel the last work would almost certainly be shelved with their other books. Crime and Punishment isn’t kept next to the Sue Graftons.

But here’s my point: as long as crime fiction is to remain as vibrant and socially significant as it is we should embrace our low status. Any form that doesn’t accept its essential nature moves endangers itself. To prove this point I need only two words: Rock Opera.

Crime fiction has its own qualities and place in literature, its own social functions which we shed at our peril.

It has pace and verve and is, at its best, read quickly, guiltily, under desks, in buses, on beaches and in stationery cupboards while the work piles up on your desk. Detective fiction is rarely crammed down the throats of unwilling children. It’s pop music pretending to be classical: punk musicians doing a rock opera or Prog Rock concept album with three cords and a drummer on speed.

Crime fiction is different from literary fiction. More than any other genre crime writing is transitory, reflecting contemporary social mores and obsessions. Ian Rankin once said that if you want to know what is really happening in any society, read its crime fiction.

Most successful crime writers are pressured into producing a novel a year to build up momentum in their readership. Few crime writers spend six years on a book, working and reworking, researching themes and stopping for a six month break in Tuscany. The proliferation of creative writing courses feeds into the literary fiction market, woe and ridicule will betide the student who admits to wanting to write a crime novel.

But I think the difference runs deeper than marketing or production values: crime writers are different from other writers. Demographically, I suspect that we are from a lower socio-economic group than literary writers. Of the Tartan Noir crowd, I can’t think of one from a higher socio-economic background than lower-middle. This includes writers as disparate as Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Chris Brookmyre and Louise Welsh.

Perhaps as a result the working attitude is different too.  

A visit to the bar at any crime event will tell you that crime writers are very work-man like about writing: no one talks about literature, metaphysics or who they’re reading at the moment. The talk is all of deadlines, how much money we’re making and where we got to visit on our latest promotional trip. Less Gogol than Google.

A few years ago I attended the 'Semana Negra', Black Week, in Northern Spanish town of Gijon - see? Crime writer bumming about on a promotional trip. Great fun. Lovely food. Crime writers from all over the world had been invited to the festival and a specially commissioned train ran from Madrid to the Northern coast, carrying the writers and the press only. A conference was called mid-train journey, for everyone to have a round-table discussion with the journalists about our work and what we were attempting to achieve. Almost to a man, every writer talked about politics, about the current social concerns of their country, about immigrants, government and deviance.

The Cuban contingent were being shadowed by the Cuban secret police, polite men, shabbily dressed, who sat at a table near them in the restaurant and nodded at the floor when the writers said hello. They were one of the reasons we had a specially commissioned train: so that the Cubans could speak freely to the press. Cuban crime writing was considered sufficiently threatening to warrant a nice trip for the state policemen because it addresses issues of homosexuality, emigration and the state control of the press. They were able to address these forbidden issues in crime novels by framing them as a narrative device instead of a bald political statement.

I expect the secret policemen had a nice bum about on that trip themselves.

Crime fiction is read differently as well. No one foists Chandler on children and orders them to jolly well read it, it’ll do you good. Agatha Christies are for sick days and holidays. Theatre groups of young actors don’t visit schools to perform scenes from Leave a Message for Willie (Marcia Muller), and it can’t be argued that the reason is the unsuitability of the material: Hamlet has a higher body count and concerns far darker impulses.

Crime is read differently than literary fiction: quickly and voraciously. To alter the position of crime fiction would be to undermine that quick, hungry enjoyment. If we insist that crime fiction is to be read like literature, to be ponderously read, to be considered, would be to alter the form fundamentally.

Jazz has changed from being background noise in small, smoky clubs to Wynton Marsalis conducting rigid arrangements in arenas. Mr Marsalis is wonderful, a great musician, but I once saw him live and this happened: at the break the big band stepped down and went off for a drink. Mr Marsalis addressed the audience and told them that the band would be back in half an hour. Then he and a piano player and a bassist stood and played the most exquisite music I’ve ever heard but the audience had been told that this was the break and stopped listening, got up, wandered around, went to the lavatory, chatted and fumbled with their coats. Audiences believe what they are told about listening or looking or reading. If they are told to take something seriously they’ll generally do so. Brave indeed is the reader who tells the book group they thought Pride and Prejudice was a load of old bollocks.

As far as crime fiction is concerned, validation, the harsh spot light of academic focus, will not only serve to weed out the worst and highlight the best: it changes the interaction between the writer and reader to such a degree as to alter the essential nature of the form. Writers will take longer to produce novels and inevitably books will no longer reflect our mores and moral conundrums.

The intense publishing regime of successful crime novelists has the unintended consequence of making them reflect our social undercurrents more than any other novelised form but not only reflexive, also informs.

Human beings need narrative to make sense of the world. The Bible, parables, and biographies are all touch stones in our collective psyche. These arcs come to have the power of orthodoxies but only if they are current. Early Hitchcock films used a Freudian narrative framework that now seems outdated and more than a little bizarre. Dream sequences and Professor Littleoldman feel like clumsy devices, while brutalised childhoods and lonely alcoholic policemen make perfect sense.

These narrative arcs inform more than simply future novelists. Crime fiction gives currency to ideas on a subliminal, populous level, so that they are absorbed into the culture in immeasurable ways.

A close friend of mine works with sex offenders. From crime fiction comes the narrative convention of an inciting psychic incident in a criminal’s life. This incident needs to be uncovered and resolved before the person can move onto another phase in their life and this convention of crime fiction totally informs the treatment of sex offenders.

In fact, the evidence of successful treatment of sex offending invariably supports not delving into the sex offenders’ background or trying to bring closure to childhood incidents. Effective treatment focuses on avoiding situations where the offender is likely to victimise and on trying to change their sexual stimulus or at least help them control it. Yet most social work in the UK is based on helping offenders come to terms with their childhood.

The truth is that crime fiction, read on buses and beaches, sniggered at by the bigger boys who went to better schools, is a potent social force. Readers and writers of the form need to accept that what we are doing is a valid artistic endeavour, what ever its reception, classification or treatment.

Or, as a crime writer might say, take the free trips and the money and run.

Denise Mina's latest novel The Dead Hour will be published in July 2006.