Tag Archives: mystery

The Genre Conundrum

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Bouchercon, the international mystery writers convention, has just finished a four-day run in Minneapolis. Very interesting, panels on 80+ topics. I attended several, including one on techno-thrillers. Yet again, the genre I live in has shifted.

Ten years ago, my fiction genre was thriller. My stories checked the traditional boxes: Large, maybe world-spanning problem, typically discovered by an individual, usually a non-professional. Fast paced story in which reader knows both the protagonist’s and the antagonist’s thoughts and the question is not so much Whodunit? (as in Mystery) as it is Who will prevail? (as in Suspense).

Gone Girl had been published, and someone in marketing at Gillian Flynn’s publisher had slapped Thriller on the cover despite the lack of almost anything thrilleresque about the book. But it is a good book, and it sold. So over the following decade, many books became thrillers and the definition of thriller collapsed to “fast-paced.”

I watched that happen and adjusted my queries to be “thriller/suspense.” The addition of Suspense recognized that my thrillers had characters with wants, needs, fears.

There is so much writing about technology now that thriller has grown whiskers (aka sub-genres). I think I learned at Bouchercon that my first book, Fatal Score, and all my other manuscripts except Skins and Bone are techno-thrillers.

If my friend Carl Brookins reads this, he will take the opportunity to peel a layer or two of my skin off next time we meet at the critique group Crème de la Crime. “Rogers, how the hell many times do I have to tell you, genre doesn’t matter. Readers don’t give a damn about genre. Totally unnecessary.” Of course, Carl is a many times published mystery writer, so he can ignore genre. I can’t ignore genre, because the query letters I send hoping to snare an agent or publisher demand that the genre be named. So what used to be a comfortable definition is now a crap shoot. Next letter … maybe thriller/suspense? Techno-thriller? Crypto-techno-thriller?  Damn.

Agatha Christie and Sexual Abuse

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Agatha Christie gave me the courage to include a currently-risky idea in Fatal Score. 

As I’ve mentioned before, I am not as widely-read in my own genre as I should be. The category ‘Thriller’ is a subset of Suspense, which is in turn a subset of Mystery. So I set out to read some contemporary and classic mysteries. My prior post covers several contemporary works. 

I’ve just finished Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, widely considered to be one of her best. It’s also the best-selling mystery of all time. 

It makes one understand why she is so important to the genre. The book was published in Britain in 1939 under the title Ten Little Niggers, taken from the minstrel song that structures the plot. It has been published in the United States under a couple of titles (including a substitution of ‘Indians’ for the n-word, which probably worked fine in 1940 but is surely suspect today). The edition I read uses the last line of the song. Which brings us to fashion, which is to say, what is considered good form at a point in time.

Clothing fashion moves quickly. I always thought writing fashion was far slower. But even eighty years ago, writing fashion was quite different than today.

Today, authors are encouraged to minimize the number of named characters to reduce confusion. By my count, Christie has twenty. We are taught not to switch character perspective (point of view) often. The exception is the Romance category, which tolerates rapid POV change (derisively known as head-hopping). Christie would give a heavy-breathing romance novel a run for its money. In dialog, we are told not to lead with ‘he/she said’, because we end up with a string of them. Christie does it all the time.

The point for me is, after all that, And Then There Were None is a ripping good story. Clean structure set up by the poem. By the second death, every reader knows what’s going to happen and has hints as to how. The technique issues quickly become irrelevant to the reading of the story.

I mention all of this because I got a surprising response from one of my (female) beta readers of Fail Deadly. In the story, Weezy is captured and tortured to force her to keep a secret. The torturer is a man, and when he gets the opportunity (when his female boss is not around), the torture is sexual. The beta reader said, “I would not read this. No agent will accept it.” The gist of the argument was that the tenor of the times will not allow it, particularly as written by a man. Too sensitive; too toxic. 

Unfortunately, the despicable acts are important to character arc, so I’m presented with a conundrum. Weaken the story or risk rejection and censure?

Emboldened by several other female beta readers and my editor, I finally concluded that the bones of the story override the sensitivity of the times. Hope I’m right.