Pop Fiction Isn't Genre Fiction

Not necessarily, anyway.

I was reminded of this while reading a Patricia D. Cornwall detective novel from 1990, "Postmortem," via a paperback picked up in a fifty-cent bin.

Ms. Cornwall from the start is striving to be literary; "serious"; through too much detail from the start, as well as a couple excrutiatingly bad sub-plots, involving a niece and a boyfriend, both of whom as characters are, at best, unlikable.

The novel can be better. There's a way to do it. It's what a handful of writers in this country are working toward.