Is Michael Crichton A Guilty Pleasure? Or Just A Pleasure?

It is 7:30 p.m. and I am at the writers’ meeting for Arts, a weekly ritual where our editors and contributors gather to share story ideas. We are discussing this issue with its very promising “Guilty Pleasures” theme.

The possibilities are endless. After all, there are plenty of books whose existence cannot easily be explained.

We’ve all seen the seedy romances sporting Fabio’s sculpted torso that line supermarket checkout lanes. I like to look at the titillating front covers and read the hilarious backs: voluptuous vixens are always encountering desperately handsome lonely hearts in the woods and the Wild West, and man, those guys must be juicing.

On the racks nearby are the boring, solid-colored Danielle Steels and the sober, CIA-sealed Vince Flynns.

I love how Flynn has a rave review from Dan Brown on the cover of “Memorial Day,” and Brown has an equally enthusiastic endorsement from Flynn on “Deception Point.”

“Why not review Michael Crichton for this issue?” one Arts editor says with a sneer, as if the name “Crichton” were as repulsive to the lips as “Kevin Federline.”

This gives me pause. Michael Crichton ’64, the brains behind “Jurassic Park,” is a guilty pleasure?

I suppose he qualifies as a hack writer, especially after the laughable global-warming-is-a-myth diatribe “State of Fear.” He is certainly popular and prolific enough to be dismissed as a trashy writer...and he did live in Weld (see “Tome Raider”).

But his stories, for the most part, are both enjoyable and, well, well-crafted.

No one will mistake Crichton, who was also a Crimson editor, for a literary genius, but we can often be too hasty in dismissing the mass paperback masters as bad storytellers and writers. We forget that successfully crafting a compelling plot—weaving together the twists and unleashing unexpected intersections—is a difficult task on par with understanding Faulkner.

There is something beautiful about plots in trashy romances that zigzag, but come together perfectly in the end. For instance: who would have guessed that Darcy was related to Lady Catherine—I’m just kidding! “Pride and Prejudice” isn’t a trashy romance, no matter how soap operatic it gets in the middle.

Regardless, the point stands. Coming up with a good story is not easy.

I found out the hard way when I ambitiously set out to write a novel in fifth grade.

Armed with a comprehensive knowledge of the Hardy Boys canon and a working understanding of Cam Jansen, I started putting the wild adventures of teenage sleuth Fred Flight to paper. In one chapter, a ninja star ices Fred’s friend in the jungles; in another, terrorists blow up a gas station as Fred narrowly rolls away to safety.

Looking back on my handiwork, I am especially pleased with a section that should have been called “Fred Versus the Volcano.” Fred and his girlfriend are casually strolling on the peak of a mountain when she slips and falls into the dormant volcano’s yawning maw. Fred peers wistfully into the lava-redness.

“Then he went home because he needed to get his beauty sleep,” I wrote.

By the next chapter, Fred is wrestling wolves in Alaska.

I tried fiction a few more times, but the results were always the same. I would describe these great battle scenes and these exciting action heroes, but I would always leave out a plot because I could never think of one.

Flight ended up dispensing a lot of justice, but for what ends, nobody really knew. I should have given up writing and gone to work on Steven Seagal scripts.

Flash forward nine years. I offer a weak defense of Crichton while the other editors silently doubt my credentials.

But I’m not afraid anymore. I guiltily admit it: I love Crichton and Brown and John Grisham and Michael Connelly, with all their novels about dinosaurs and bishops, lawyers and detectives.

Maybe the National Book Foundation wasn’t so off target when it bestowed upon Stephen King the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003, to the chagrin of the literary elite.

Whatever the merits of their writing, these authors have storytelling skills—and that is more than can be said about me. Or, for that matter, Danielle Steel.

—Staff writer David Zhou can be reached at dzhou@fas.harvard.edu.