The Half-Life of the Interest of Popular Fiction

I recall seeing a data set which showed that of some 60 million copies of works of fiction sold in the first half of 2018, some 3.6 million were classics--6 percent or so in a period that I have no reason to regard as unrepresentative. That is scarcely more than the reported sales of just those books with James Patterson's name on their covers (not long ago credited with accounting for about 4 percent of the total), which means that Patterson alone was coming close to matching the sales of every famous old author you have ever heard of put together, from Jane Austen to Emile Zola.

Comparisons aside, this works out to not much more than a copy a year for every forty to fifty Americans. Moreover, consider the reasons for the sales. How many of them are for students in school assigned the books? How many for restocking libraries? And how many to make a coffee table or a book shelf look good? In short, few of even this small percentage of sales are a matter of individuals voluntarily, seriously choosing to read the works in question. Meanwhile, even those who do pick up such books without some educator demanding it do so because they feel they "have" to do so as self-respecting persons of education and culture, many in the most "middlebrow" fashion. The result is that those who pick up such books very often because they genuinely enjoy even a part of "the canon" is very small indeed.

Why raise this all too familiar point again? The reason is that it seems a useful point of comparison with the sales of those books that have become old without becoming classics. Sales of these are harder to glean from the available data. But it seems that even the popular books of yesteryear acquire the disadvantages of age without the advantages of being classics, commercially as in other ways. One is not assigned to read them in school, and librarians feel less obliged to keep copies in stock. Meanwhile individuals looking to show off are less likely to think they can impress anyone by having them on their coffee table or their book shelf, and few will feel they "have" to read them for any reason. All that automatically means fewer sales, and even beyond sales, less chance of their being noticed by those who might actually find them interesting. And when people do happen upon them, in contrast with those approaching Important Literature, with which all but the most callow are prepared to show some patience because even if it is not all that entertaining when they first pick it up it (perhaps, because it has come down to us from another time, with different standards) it may yet prove worth their while, no such case is made for popular fiction. Facing it their demand to be entertained immediately, significantly and fluently is uncompromising, and it must be admitted that given the narrowness of most personal tastes, very little is likely to make the cut.

All of this affects all fiction. (Certainly those who insist that anything they pick up conform to a 2020s' standard of "wokeness" will find very, very little older fiction bearable.) However, I suspect that it is a particular problem for the thriller genre, and especially thrillers of the "high," big picture type. Political thrillers derive much of their interest from the topicality of their premise--and that tends to decline very quickly. (I recently read a Customer Review of a Robert Ludlum novel from the 1980s in which the reviewer complained about the book's being set in the 1980s, as if the reader were somehow cheated by that! Such a complaint is of course absurd--but reflective of how easily such work loses its interest.)

Meanwhile, with visual media leading and print fiction following, the expectation has increasingly been of brisker, more action-packed thrillers; and in line with the demand for action and briskness (and not only that) the books easier to read. (Back in the '60s, the '70s, even the '80s John le Carrè managed to be among the top bestsellers of his day. Now even a Robert Ludlum likely would not make the cut. Besides the problem posed by how today's superabundance of spy-fi sets the standard with regard to pacing and thrills, he expects his readers to know words like "pavane" and "bromide," which is totally a deal-breaker in an age in which Dan Brown sets the standard with regard to prose.)

Indeed, looking back the fact that I read so much of those thrillers strikes me as having been a matter of picking up the '80s-era hits of Clancy and Ludlum and Cussler back when those books’ authors were, if already passing their peak of popularity, still fairly new, and those writers still fairly prominent on the bestseller lists; in my having a stronger-than-average in their themes; and in the early ‘90s being a period before visual media so totally supplanted those sorts of thrillers in their niche; all of which went to form a rather different interest. But formed that interest was, and so here I am writing about those authors and their books all these decades later, long after, to all evidences, general interest in them has decayed to nearly nothing.