What's the difference btwn literary and genre and do not tell me the writing quality.

DennisB said:

Interesting. I would say that Michael Connelly is firmly a genre (crime) writer. His style is straight-ahead. Nothing fancy. But almost all of the books have MC (Harry Bosch) trying to solve one single and otherwise inconsequential murder while battling both the LAPD hierarchy and his own demons .

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Few would call Connelly literary - he is, as you say, an extremely stripped-down stylist. He's also one who tells as much as, or more than, he shows; which is actually a very successful mode for thriller writers. (I'm reading a thriller right now which is literally all telling, no showing. It's been *very* successful.) He doesn't have the strong flavour of, say, a Chandler or Ellroy, genre writers who I'd call literary. You don't get so much of a sense of the man behind the curtain with a Connelly.

An example of a supremely literary writer was Ray Bradbury, yet he dealt almost exclusively with SF&F.

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Yeah, and again, I think the strong distinctive voice and beautiful style is part of the reason Bradbury is regarded as literary. But the other component is acclamation and context. It's often the case that writers who wrote in a pulp or genre context are later co-opted by the canon - but weren't regarded as literary straight away (and sometimes not in their liftetimes.)