In publishing, literary fiction novels are regarded as having more literary merit than most commercial or “genre” fiction.
All the same, a number of major literary figures have also written genre fiction, for example, John Banville publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black, and both Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood have written science fiction.
Furthermore, Nobel laureate André Gide stated that Georges Simenon, best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret, was “the most novelistic of novelists in French literature”.
The notion that literary fiction has more merit as art than genre fiction is only believed by people with large crowbars up their collective keisters.
– GTJ
