Does Linda Fairstein Deserve a Literary Honor? Critics Say Her past as a Prosecutor Sullies Her Art.

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From The Washington Post:

Linda Fairstein has been rightly celebrated by many as a feminist icon. For more than 25 years, she was head of the largely male sex crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where she was involved in several high-profile cases, including the “Preppy Murder” case and another I will get to in a minute. Fairstein used her pioneering legal work as the basis for 20 mystery novels featuring Manhattan sex crimes prosecutor Alexandra “Alex” Cooper. The books have been lauded for their insider view of the Manhattan D.A.’s office as well as for their deep historical knowledge of the New York sites where they’re set.

Late last year, Fairstein — whose most recent book, “Blood Oath,” came out in March — earned the esteem of the Mystery Writers of America, which announced that it would honor her and “Gorky Park” author Martin Cruz Smith with the lifetime achievement Grand Masters Award at a banquet to be held in New York on April 25. The Edgars are the most prestigious honors in the mystery genre, and the Grand Master is the highest accolade. Past winners include Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier, Ross Macdonald, Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen King, Walter Mosley and Sue Grafton.

Two days after its initial announcement, the Mystery Writers of America said it had changed its mind: Fairstein was not to be honored.

At issue was one of the other high-profile cases in which Fairstein was involved. In 1989, she oversaw the interrogation (conducted by another prosecutor) of the Central Park Five, the five black and Latino teenagers who were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for the rape of a 28-year-old white female jogger in Central Park. The teenagers maintained that their confessions were coerced. After DNA evidence exonerated them in 2002, all charges were vacated.

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Fairstein has steadfastly defended the work of her office, and her crucial involvement in the case is a matter of public record.

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But the announcement of Fairstein’s award set off a Twitter fight. Attica Locke — whose novel “Bluebird, Bluebird” won last year’s Edgar for best mystery — tweeted that Fairstein was “almost single-handedly responsible for the wrongful incarceration of the Central Park Five.”

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The fact that Fairstein was personally involved in what many now see as a racist miscarriage of justice made members of the Mystery Writers of America very uncomfortable.

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The process of evaluating contenders for an award — literary or otherwise — has never been tidy. Is the work the thing that’s being judged? The life? Some mishmash of both? And, if the life is being factored into the process, must one’s entire record of opinions and actions be unanimously judged to be humane and just?

Consider that in 1948, Ezra Pound — then incarcerated as a mental patient at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington on treason charges for fascist broadcasts he made in Italy during World War II — received the Bollingen Prize in poetry for “The Pisan Cantos.” The New York Times headline the next day read: “Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell.” Then there’s the case of director Elia Kazan, who received a lifetime achievement award at the 1999 Oscars ceremony. Kazan had never apologized for “naming names” of fellow members of the Group Theatre who, like himself, had once been members of the Communist Party. Should Pound or Kazan have been honored?

Those who believe that art and literature should be judged strictly on their own terms, separate from the life and times of the human beings who created them, would say yes. Implicitly in this camp are the mid-20th-century literary critics who espoused a reliance on close readings of texts known as New Criticism and, later, deconstructionist critics like Roland Barthes, whose classic essay “The Death of the Author” pooh-poohed any attention to an author’s biography as naive.

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Complicating matters is that we no longer seem to have a consensus about who “deserves” these awards — even on their own terms — so cordoning off the art from politics, or as W.B. Yeats termed it, “the dancer from the dance,” is itself just another kind of argument to process. When, for example, the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes were announced earlier this month, some critics on social media pointed out that since 2000, only six women have won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. “It doesn’t help,” one person wrote, that Junot Díaz is on the board. Last year, Díaz was accused by several women of sexual misconduct and verbal abuse. Lost in this conversation is not only whether the winner — Richard Powers’s “The Overstory” — is worthy of the prize but whether we even have broadly acceptable language that can convey what being “worthy” on the “merits” (itself a contested word) even means.

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As for Linda Fairstein, the question is not, “Does Fairstein deserve the honor?” but, rather, “Should the Mystery Writers of America have been able to plausibly defend giving an honor to Fairstein, regardless of who protested or why?” If it couldn’t, it should have known that before announcing that she had won. By withdrawing Fairstein’s name after it was criticized, the organization appeared both feckless and perversely ignorant of the career of the very person it, days earlier, presented to the public as deserving of its imprimatur.

Link to the rest at The Washington Post