Dissecting Crime Fiction

Maybe it’s because I used to work for big consumer goods companies, but I tend to think about things in terms of how they can be most clearly categorized.

For example--soft drinks. You could say that some soft drinks are high sugar, some are sugar free. Or you could say that some drinks are purchased by older people, some by younger people. Or you could say that sugar content and age are less important than the image of the drink itself--some drinks look natural and full of fruit, while others look technical and full of additives. It just depends on how you cut it up.

Nothing could be more offensive, I know, than turning this approach to books. But I was interested to hear a discussion on BBC Radio here in Britain recently, in which a major player in the publishing industry was asked her view on the most important development in fiction publishing over the past year. Without hesitation, she replied, “Literary books. They’ve become a category in their own right. Now we’ve got Romance, Crime, Misery Memoir, and so on. And Literary is a category by itself, alongside those.”

What if we turned this kind of approach to crime fiction alone? You could say that some crime books are British, some American, some Scandinavian, and so on. Or you could say that geography isn’t important--some are about police officers, some are about private investigators, wherever they happen to live. Or you could say that some books are set in the present day, while others are historical. Or you could say--as I tended to believe until recently--that crime books can be categorized by their opening page. For example, my first novel, Corn Dolls, in which an investigator arrives in a closed community with something to hide. Or my second book, Steel Witches, which finds an investigator being asked to track down a missing person (personally, a favorite category, regardless of geography or setting or the employment status of the detective).

Recently, however, as I’ve been approaching the final stages of writing Book Three in my Tom Fletcher series, I have come round to thinking that crime books only really fall into two big categories. Geography isn’t the key. Neither is gender. And using the protagonist’s employment status or a book’s historical setting to categorize it falls short of ideal. No, the answer is this:

One type of crime book says: Something happened and we don’t know what it was. We want to find out.

The other type of crime book says: We know what happened. It’s obvious. What we want to know now is, what are these guys going to do about it?

What’s interesting is that I think most crime books (including mine, so far) fall into the first category. And if you think about the second group, the shining example is Elmore Leonard.

Leonard’s books rarely contain elements of digging into the past, finding out what happened. They’re more about people ricocheting off each other, setting off reactions that the reader wants to follow through, bouncing off in directions we hadn’t thought of.

As I begin to look at Book Four in my series, I’m starting to think not in terms of setting--who the main protagonist is, what happens on the first page (though obviously that’s critical, too). Instead, I’m thinking more about how early in the book I can clear up the question of What happened, and move on to the issue of What are we going to do about it. That’s a surprisingly big shift to make, but I’m looking forward to it.