Criminal Record - NYTimes.com Marilyn Stasio has now been on the case for 25 years. In the Sept. 18, 1988, issue of the Book Review, Stasio took over the Crime column from her predecessor, Newgate Callendar (the pen name for Harold C. Schonberg, who covered classical music for The Times). She's been grading detective work ever since. In a recent phone interview, she described her early nerves. "My preference at the time was for well-mannered, very smart detectives," Stasio said. I was afraid I was this big fraud, that I only liked one kind of writing and I would be found out. The first time I had to review a hard-boiled mystery, I would be dead. But instead I found that I really liked it. I love serial killers and mad dogs and all that stuff. The biggest changes in the genre over the past quarter-century, according to Stasio, occurred when American women like Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and others entered the field and the convention of Heroic Man rescuing Helpless Maiden had to be overhauled. New victims had to be found. "Children were great; they were ideal," Stasio said. They were being kidnapped all over the place, left and right. One year, in three separate books, entire busloads of children were kidnapped. Before coming to The Times, Stasio wrote Mystery Alley, a syndicated review column. During that period, she said, "editors were very glad to get the genre off their hands. I would read it all for them. They knew nothing, and didn't care. That, too, has changed. It went from being a despised genre read by vulgarians like me to a very respected branch of literature. "The respectability that came with the phrase "graphic novel" is a thoroughgoing annoyance to me, because it leads to books that are made to be studied in academia, and that's no less of a marketplace than making comics to appeal to 12-year-old boys whose prepubescent stirrings are beginning and they have to be titillated with action and sexualized images." - Art Spiegelman, in NEA Arts Magazine Radical Fiction This week Pankaj Mishra and Jennifer Szalai appear for the first time in our new back-page feature, Bookends, where they take on the question: "How well does contemporary fiction address radical politics?" Mishra is the author of several books, including "The Romantics," a novel, and "From the Ruins of Empire." He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and contributes essays on politics and literature to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Guardian of London and The London Review of Books. Szalai was until 2010 a senior editor at Harper's Magazine, where she oversaw the "Reviews" section. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation and The London Review of Books, among others.