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Why does discrimination against crime writing still exist? Scottish author Philip Kerr's latest novel, If the Dead Rise Not, this year beat more than 160 books from around the globe to win the world's most lucrative crime fiction award - the £109,000 RBA International Prize - yet it warranted barely a mention in our national press. Compare and contrast with all the acres of coverage devoted to the 2009 Man Booker prize.
Like John le Carré, Kerr seems to be more honoured abroad than he is at home. Le Carré has always lamented the crude segregation between genre and literary fiction.
For years he was classified as a mere thriller writer, hence his failure to be even considered for literary awards.
He was undoubtedly the victim of bookish snobbery and his commercial success made envious hackles rise. His work sells millions worldwide, many of his books have been turned into films and TV dramas and he has made a lasting contribution to English literature.
But le Carré has never shied away from tackling the big subjects of our times: the Cold War, the pharmaceutical industry, genocide.
Critics feared that he would have nothing to write about after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but they were wrong.
And what is wrong with genre fiction anyway? Le Carré's literary predecessors are Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and John Buchan, who are all still read to this day, unlike most former Booker prize winners.
Another crime writer, James Ellroy, whose new novel, Blood's a Rover, is out this week, has proved how the genre can be reinvented.
The American's trademark staccato prose style has breathed new life into the form - at the expense of his health, alas, as his devotion to his art drove him to a nervous breakdown. Few writers have captured the feverish, paranoid JF Kennedy years so well.
When Raymond Chandler's novels first appeared they were seen as nothing more than cheap entertainment for the masses. But he came to be admired by everyone from Evelyn Waugh to WH Auden and is now recognised as one of the finest prose stylists of his day.
His dialogue was superb and he was a sorcerer of the demotic simile: "His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish." He also bequeathed to us one of literature's great modern heroes: the weary, wisecracking Philip Marlowe.
It is a crime against literature to segregate fiction into lowbrow and highbrow in the way that most crime fiction has been dismissed.
What is more important is whether it is any good. Kerr's award for his Berlin noir novel suggests we should all be taking (and reading) him and the best of his genre more seriously.
Still a far from equitable life
Thank goodness former Avengers star and Bond girl Honor Blackman has added her voice to those demanding compensation for the million victims of the Equitable Life debacle.
Fifteen Equitable Life pensioners die each day waiting for justice but, after nine years of denial and delay, the Government still can't say when policyholders will be compensated.
What I don't understand is why the Government is happy to bail out bankers with taxpayers' money, and sanction bonuses for them paid for by us, but is still dragging its feet over Equitable Life.
Last year the Parliamentary Ombudsman said the Government was guilty of "a decade of regulatory failure" and recommended substantial compensation for policyholders.
The Goverment quibbled with the findings but has now made an embarrassing climbdown after being taken to the High Court. But still no sign of a date.
As Blackman's alter ego Cathy Gale tells Steed in the Avengers: "Go out and come through the front door like a civilised human being."
Check out the book — that's a real education
Those who have seen the film An Education, adapted from Lynn Barber's memoir by Nick Hornby, all testify that Carey Mulligan is a star in the making. I agree.
But what the screen version lacks is Lynn Barber's own bracing unsentimentality. Her parents are portrayed far more sympathetically on screen than they are in her book.
Barber recalls her mother's genteel pretentions (she gave elocution lessons) and her "beta brain"; she also mocks her father's working-class origins and reveals he was hitting his daughter into his late eighties.
Not quite the image of suburban gentility we expect from Twickenham.
Barber confesses in her book that she is a deeply unreliable memoirist whose memory is not to be trusted. "I'm never exactly a slave to facts at the best of times," she writes. "But does it matter?" No, of course it doesn't, but for another version of this story, read the book.
The old saying goes, you've read the book, now see the film. Barber and Mulligan are two very different beasts.
Try kicking up a dust, Anish
If you have not caught up with the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy, check it out.
It's not so much his ability to distort your vision which is so impressive as the sheer scale of his work.
"Yellow" is supposed to resemble a wall from a distance, which on approach you discover is concave.
However, when I saw "Yellow" last weekend it was filled with dust, which completely ruined the optical illusion. Surely the RA's budget extends to a feather duster?
