Whatever happened to light fiction?

O'Hara could type off a short story the way assistant editors used to type off editorials. Enjoyable writing. Making a simple point. And above all, short - and so well written

Back in the day when reading was a major form of entertainment, there was a type of fiction called “light” fiction. That genre seems to have died around 1970. 

Those were just simple stories, with no great philosophical message in them or woke or post-modern angst. They were what Graham Greene had called many of his own books: Entertainments. 

But the writing was so good that many of them became “literature’ in the course of time. And that’s the only criterion I have employed for the examples of writing I have used below. 

These light stories were like a thumri or an etude.