Why does a popular press hate popular books?

One beautiful day in the summer of 1978 I became a reporter on The Times. It was the start of eight wonderful years that taught me most of the little I know about journalism and life. During that period the paper changed enormously. In 1978 it was owned by the Canadian Thomson organisation, a paternalistic, old-fashioned company that allowed The Times to wallow in its own lazy self-image as the grande dame of British journalism, Margaret Rutherford with a fountain pen and a notebook.

Writers were treated like gods. Their copy was rarely changed, and when it was one almost received an apology. A couple of specialists still broke for afternoon sherry at four pm. And the arts were still the arts: classical music, opera, the odd piece of jazz, proper literature and pretty much nothing else. I found the latter part a bit baffling. I was twenty five years old and loved popular culture too: movies, rock music, thriller and crime fiction. But for The Times these things barely existed. If you wanted to read about them — and who would? — you had to look elsewhere.

People did, in their droves, which was why the sales kept struggling. This was not going to last.

Thomson sold out and the Murdoch empire came in. Rupert Murdoch gets a lot of stick and always has done. Some of it’s deserved but I met him a couple of times back then and he always struck me as a newspaper man at heart. Any newspaper man could see that the way The Times was treating culture was plainly ridiculous. Newspapers are commercial publishing ventures. They need to gear their content to the tastes and habits of their readers, not the whims of those who edit them.

So things began to change, as they did on other papers too. Today the prints are full of reviews of third-rate pop acts, mindless TV programmes and concerts by has-been rock stars who should have hung up their Gibson Flying Vs years ago. Newspapers have swallowed the hype of celebrity culture hook, line and sinker, and fill their pages with the most awful adoring drivel, often about ‘stars’ who have the shelf life of a mayfly and occasionally the talent too.

But not everywhere. The literary pages have sailed on regardless, never ‘dumbing down’, rarely asking themselves: do our readers actually buy the stuff we’re writing about? Yes, if there’s a new Harry Potter or Dan Brown they’ll pull out the stops to bang out an overnight review. The rest of the time we’re back in 1978, stuck in the sad little cliquey mire of ‘culture’. I’d hate it if the books pages went showbiz. But they really do need to wake up to the disservice they are doing their readers.

Take a look at The Times 100 Best Books of the Decade. I rather wish someone would run a list called The 100 Worst Media Ideas of the Decade. Number one would be articles that are nothing but lists. I’ve now tried to read this one three times and pretty much failed. Lists aren’t there to be read, of course, but skimmed. You hover over the titles, think, ‘I read that one, aren’t I clever?’, then browse a few more and turn the page.

How many of the hundred best books (according to The Times) have I read (or tried to)? Very few. Most of those on the list are completely new to me. This doesn’t mean they’re not worth reading, of course. Just that a lot of them are titles that the man on the Clapham omnibus will never have heard of. In the crime field Ian Rankin makes it to 57 for Fleshmarket Close and that’s it. Robert Harris has The Ghost at 49, which is a kind of thriller I guess, while Dan Brown makes it to 10 with The Da Vinci Code but then gets the prize for the worst book of the decade for the same title. No, me neither.

There are no Scandinavian crime writers, though it’s hard to move through a book store without tripping over one these days. Not much in the way of paperbacks you’d see on the shelves at Heathrow at all.

Now there’s no reason why a literary section should not produce a ‘books wot we have loved’ list. But the problem from a reader’s point of view is that it’s a list about their tastes not ours. How much more interesting would this have been if the paper gave us the 100 Best Popular Books of the Decade? A serious look at the titles most of us have bought, read and talked about.

What about Lee Child, James Patterson, Jeffery Deaver, Patricia Cornwell? How have they done over the last decade? Who are the up-and-coming writers punching to steal their crowns? Don’t we have a right to know? Isn’t that actually more important in the great swing of things than telling us that the 23rd best book of the last decade was the official report by the 9/11 Commission? It is to me. But this is popular fiction. It’s genre. Inferior. Not real books at all. So it gets short shrift.

Papers plead shortage of space. Given the economic climate and the decline in the printed media they have a point. The trouble is they were behaving like this when there was space aplenty. They don’t write much about popular fiction, the books their customers actually read, because they don’t want to.

This is how the book space was used in last Saturday’s Times. Front two pages of the review section mostly given over to an interview with Cormac McCarthy (an exclusive, though he says very little of moment). Page three occupied by a rather creepy interview with James Ellroy. Two more pages devoted to that bloody list. Lead review, most of a page, given over to a review of the letters of T.S. Eliot (great poet, died forty four years ago). A page of non-fiction covering Agassi’s memoirs, a book about a family you’ve never heard of (headlined ‘An obscure dynasty’ — there’s a ‘read me’ tag), and a review of the papers of the late journalist Hugo Young. Thrown away in the corner are a few fiction reviews, most of them literary, though Benjamin Black’s The Lemur gets a one paragraph mention which simply tries to summarise the story (Black is, of course, the ‘popular’ alter ego of the Irish Booker prize winner John Banville).

The facing page leads with reviews of two graphic novels with the opening words, ‘The celebrated children’s book illustrator David Small, feted with numerous awards in his native US, is not exactly a household name here.’ The last page has a review of the new Stephen King and Alex Rider (note how book sections almost always put the popular stuff at the back). And that’s it. The last page also contains the weekly bestseller list. It is full of names that rarely grace the book pages at all, except in the charts. Some of them I know, as writers, as people too. Some of them are authors I’d never read in a million years. That’s not the point. I’m not suggesting newspapers devote more space to popular fiction for the sake of writers. It’s their readers they should be thinking about. They have the right to expect that a newspaper will make some attempt to reflect their cultural tastes, and book pages simply don’t.

The best selling book in Britain last year was Linwood Barclay’s No Time for Goodbye. I checked The Times archives to see if they reviewed it. Yes, they did, favourably. But only after it got to number one. When I was a general reporter and that kind of thing happened with news stories there was always an inquest, and usually someone was invited into the room that contained what one executive liked to call ‘the arse-kicking machine’. With good reason too.

I’ve picked on my own paper here because it’s the one I still take at home. This is a little unfair. Snobbery on the literary pages is rife, and not just a British affair. The American prints often behave much the same way. Many of those are steadily killing book review space too on ‘economic grounds’.

This is madness. If the press still reviewed music the way they review books they’d be full of articles about nothing but opera and Beethoven, and they wouldn’t be read much either. Newspapers are facing a struggle for survival. It might help if they acknowledged the leisure habits of their customers. They don’t seem to have a problem with that when it comes to music, film and even, these days, video games. If serious newspapers can go starry-eyed over the latest Lady GaGa album, some super-violent arcade title on X-Box and pop acts that are deeply obscure to anyone over the age of twenty five they can surely bring themselves to admit that popular fiction, read by millions, has a place in their pages too.

The Times should consider this more than most. From what I’ve read Rupert Murdoch will soon be asking the public to pay to visit its pages on the web. Who’s going to do that for a literary section that’s full of articles about books you don’t want to read?