Ah, the vibrancy to be found in today’s open marketplace of ideas. A week after bookstore proprietor and books editor Otto Penzler trashed “chick-lit” cozy mysteries in the conservative New York Sun newspaper (inciting a blowback of criticism in the blogosphere), The Christian Science Monitor today published a good-sized feature championing the role of women writers in this genre. Don’t look, Otto--it will only raise your blood pressure, and at 64 years of age, that’s never a good idea.Anyway, Monitor writer Marilyn Gardner quotes Libby Fischer Hellmann, president of Sisters in Crime, as saying that “Almost half of the estimated 1,500 mysteries published each year in the U.S. are written by women.” This has at least been good for the image of women in crime fiction, Hellmann observes: “Forty years ago, when you had Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett writing, they had the dames with the legs that went on forever. Now women are much more three-dimensional, much more layered.” And though many female writers still don’t make as much money from their books as their male counterparts do, author Elaine Viets (Murder Unleashed) insists that the future of this genre rests firmly in women’s hands. “The hard-boiled male is often the critical darling,” Viets remarks. “But I believe that the hard-boiled thriller is old-fashioned now. The really difficult books are the books about everyday relationships, about maintaining a job, maintaining a family. It’s easy to make a thriller interesting. It’s much harder to keep people interested in ordinary life, yet women have that skill to keep people reading for 300 pages. Women don’t always write grand books, big thrillers. But they do the Jane Austen kind of book--the book about society.”
Here, though, is my favorite quote from the story, if only because it brings to mind an image of Penzler’s steaming head blowing completely apart as he reads it:
Lisa Daily, a columnist in Sarasota, Fla., finds mysteries by women often “funnier and less gruesome.” She adds, “You get all of the excitement of a good mystery yarn without having to endure seven nauseatingly descriptive pages of blood.”Heaven forfend!
3 comments:
Hammett and Chandler were still writing in 1966? Wow. There was me thinking that Hammett was five years a corpse and Chandler seven years dead.
Apart from that, I have no opinion I could possibly express here.
Hmm.. what about writers like Jason Starr who do hardboiled thrillers (well, maybe that's not a right word for him, but they are not mysteries) with a very domestic setting, and clearly "about everyday relationships, about maintaining a job, maintaining a family", as Elaine Viets says. It seems to me that she really doesn't know what kind of books hardboiled thrillers are nowadays. (Even though they are not all like Starr, of course.)
Penzler is not the only one whose head might blow apart reading all of this. I'm finding myself needing an inudstrial pack of duct tape to keep mine together... on so many levels.
Let's face it: the whole men are from Mars thing is just so tired. We're not of different species, for cryin' out loud. I get bored of hunting up the differences between us when there are so many commonalities.
And I'm glad Viets thinks it's easy to keep a thriller interesting. (!) But I can't agree -- will never agree -- that "It’s much harder to keep people interested in ordinary life..." So what she's saying here -- and I know it's likely out of context and perhaps not what she meant at all, but -- what she's saying is that women don't actually want to read crime fiction. They want to read about reality?
And "women don't always writer grand books, big thrillers." What? And men do?
OK, I'll admit it: it's possible I'm taking all of this a little more personally than I should. My novels are not cozies and they are no kind of romances, yet they occasionally get labeled that way (by people who have not read them) for the dual sins of my not having a penis and having a publisher who happens to publish a lot of romances.
Thank goodness all of this is the typical ink-swallowing spin we're used to seeing in contemporary newspapers. The reality is this, and we know it: women can write big thrillers. Men can write books from the heart and with low body counts. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Give me good books, please. And call them whatever the hell you like.
OK, I'd better go away now. You can probably tell: another application of duct tape is necessary at this juncture.
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