Justice & Law Quote by Jacques Barzun

A genre only becomes “in danger” when it succeeds too well. Barzun’s line is a neatly barbed inversion: we expect crime fiction to be threatened by censorship, bad taste, or cultural snobbery. Instead, he points to a quieter menace - overproduction - the moment when writing stops being a response to appetite and becomes an industry feeding itself.

The parenthetical “(crime fiction)” is doing sly work. It’s both a narrowing and a wink, as if Barzun is teasing the category’s respectability while granting it enough legitimacy to worry about its ecosystem. Coming from an educator and cultural critic steeped in high/low debates, the remark lands as a pragmatic rather than puritanical critique. He isn’t condemning the genre’s pleasures; he’s warning that its very accessibility invites imitation, formula, and credential-chasing. When everyone can write a whodunit, the whodunit risks becoming a standardized product: interchangeable detectives, pre-fabricated twists, comfort-food plots dressed up as “content.”

The deeper subtext is about attention as a finite resource. “More writers than readers” is a demographic joke with an economic sting: too many suppliers chasing too little demand. In that world, the incentive shifts from craft to visibility - from patient construction of suspense to frantic self-promotion, trend-hopping, and algorithm-friendly hooks. Barzun is diagnosing a cultural marketplace where the prestige of being an author outpaces the harder, quieter act of being a reader.

It’s a quip, but it’s also a forecast: when participation outgrows patronage, the art form doesn’t die - it gets noisy.