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Here in Australia we have the Miles Franklin Award, a sort of literary Oscar. It's been going for years, and you know what: practically all those literary "masterpieces" are out of print. Arthur Upfield, hugely successful crime writer here, was despised as a hack writer by the Literary Set. A national magazine which reviewed literary masterpieces failed even to print his obituary. Yet "hack" Upfield's many Bony detective novels are still in print, and still good reads.
Upfield, in fact, had fun pulling the Literary set's collective legs with his book "An Author Bites the Dust" (1948), into which he inserted himself as Clarence B Bagshott.
An exchange between detective Napoleon Bonaparte and Bagshott:
"Did Mervyn Blake ever criticize your books ?”
“Mine! Lord, no! I don’t produce literature.”
“Then what do you produce?”
“Commercial fiction.”
“There is a distinction?”
“Terrific.”
“Will you define it, please.”
“I’ll try to,” Bagshott said slowly. “In this country literature is a piece of writing executed in schoolmasterly fashion and yet so lacking in entertainment values that the general public won’t buy it. Commercial fiction— and this is a term employed by the highbrows— is imaginative writing that easily satisfies publishers and editor because the public will buy it."
Upfield no doubt enjoyed making his fictitious lion of Australia's literary set his murder victim.
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