Sat 18 Sep 2021
I remarked in a review for somebody or other not too long ago that I thought I was out of step with the field, and I feel that way more every day. With very few exceptions, the crime fiction that makes the best-seller lists and even the books that sell the best at mystery bookstores are of types I don’t care for at all, or at least nearly as much as I do others.
The bestsellers are more often than not slick, superficial, and padded in my estimation, and the most popular ones seem to be the literary equivalent of slasher movies. And if you took lawyers, thrillers, serial killers, and cozies off the mystery bookstore shelves you wouldn’t have enough books left for a good yard sale, and two-thirds of those would be historicals — and while I like the category, they’re getting to be a glut on the market.
Trash proliferates, while many of my favorite series sell just enough to keep being published, and often make it to paperback late or never; e. g., Bill Crider’s Dan Rhodes, John Riggs’ Garth Ryland, Jonathan Ross’s George Rogers, John Malcom’s Tim Simpson, Jill McGown’s Lloyd & Hill, Jon Cleary’s Scobie Malone, Michael Bowen’s Richard Michaelson, Eric Wright’s Charlie Salter, Les Roberts’ Milan Jacovich, John Brady’s Matt Minogue, Michael Collins’ Dan Fortune, Stuart Kaminsky’s Porfiry Rostnikov, David M. Pierce’s V Daniel, James Sallis’ Lew Griffin, and a bunch of et cetera‘s.
It just seems like anything between big/bloody and cute/ frothy doesn’t have too much of a chance any more. Oh well, hell, at least I’m better off than [some of you] — nobody even writes classic detective stories any more.
September 18th, 2021 at 4:33 pm
What’s changed since Barry first wrote this, over 25 years ago? Not a lot, especially if you agree with him. A lot of readers actually like the overabundance of “lawyers, thrillers, serial killers, and cozies” still being published.
I do think that a few authors are writing classic detective stories now, and even better, there’s an absolute flood of reprints in the category for folks like me to read, and if you have a Kindle, even more so.
September 18th, 2021 at 8:56 pm
Nowadays, we have to add domestic suspense to Barry’s list. The wife who looks out her window sees something weird happening across the street, and decides to investigate, then finds out her husband is involved. And the unreliable narrator who tells you her story over 400 pages and then it turns out to be a pack of lies.
September 18th, 2021 at 9:12 pm
Ha! I’ll pass on those, too, thank you.
September 18th, 2021 at 10:13 pm
As far as what can be found on the bookshelves at Barnes and Noble or even Wal-Mart Barry’s gloom seems well founded, but e-books have helped some and I seem to find more good books that way than you will see on the shelves.
There are a couple of good series set in the modern West, some historical series that still impress and offer something different, with Historical extended now to include the War and up through the Sixties, writers like Pronzini and Collins still producing, and a wider variety of books that aren’t cozy or slasher fiction than used to be available, with no few European writers (Missimo Carlotto’s hardboiled Aligator series and Vargas) available that we once would not have seen.
Granted you have to be a bit more adventurous to find them, and if you rely on only what you can find on the shelves at your favorite book store you may be no better off than Barry was, but I’m probably following more living contemporary writers now than I have since the late eighties.
Granted many of them are not bestsellers, a few are the ebook equivalent of the old library midlisters, but then we are no longer limited to what shows up in catalogues and on local bookshelves.
I find new writers and books much easier than when I relied on newspaper and magazine reviews alone.
I just stumbled onto an excellent series by an English woman writing in the Dick Francis style about a specialist in old cars who advises the police that is well written (Amy Meyers Jack Colby books, decidedly not cozy).
I fully understand people preferring real books and rebelling at reading on electronic devices, but with the price of hardcovers and the dearth of paperback publishers you are left with what you can do and the books are there if you are looking for them.
September 18th, 2021 at 10:39 pm
There’s way more to be read than ever before, David, even if there’s no enough time to read it all. If I remember correctly, all there was back in 1994 to find new material to read was the twin combo of Borders and Barnes & Noble, and boy do I miss Borders. I haven’t been to a B&N store in months, and I haven’t really needed to. With the death of the mid-list paperback, I’ve seen no need to. I wish I could say otherwise.
September 18th, 2021 at 10:14 pm
It’s a behavioral profile I can’t even explain, the habits of today’s ‘serial-readers’. The kind of reader who gobbles down five books in a row –whether they like it or not –simply because it’s in the same series by the same author.
To me, its alarmingly similar to the TV viewer who will binge a whole season of TV in one week. How do they do it? What kind of intellect indulges in such? I’m sure I don’t know. It’s the fast-food business model applied to brain processes. What kind of people are these? I can’t relate to it at all.
Book ‘consumers’ who download books in bundles from Amazon have no embarrassment about their proclivities. At least, this is what I find when I inquire to them about it. ‘Series’ reading is simply the way they read. They’ve wonder why I’m perplexed at it; they wonder why I’m not aboard with it.
When I examine their reading lists: it almost doesn’t matter how thin or banal the material; the key selling point which populates their shelves is that the content comes in a 5-or-6 installment series. They only wish to read this type of concoction.
It’s as if Tolkien and Frank Herbert were their ‘gateway drugs’ which led them to ‘Divergent’, ‘Twilight’, ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘Hunger Games’, and they’re hooked for evermore, on this format.
When I chat with them, I find they don’t want redolent, resonant, ‘singular’ reading experiences which seep with history, which require pondering, or which call on esoteric knowledge-banks. They want to glom down content in a way that makes for easy ‘skimming’.
This will sound really critical but to me, this is *not* reading. I don’t care what the proponents claim. Advocates of this mechanism are BS artists with a vested interest in sales.
It’s one short step away from …what’s that new device they have planned? Some little speed-reading gadget which you hold up to your eye and which jets words past your retina, letter-by-letter, taking advantage of one’s true WPM rate. No more ‘pages’ of words.
That sound like progress? Some people say so. Fine. I know where I stand. It don’ fly wit me.
September 18th, 2021 at 10:31 pm
You’ve been missing from these pages for a few days, Lazy. Welcome back. We’ve missed you. And by the way, I agree with you. Totally.
September 18th, 2021 at 10:30 pm
I think you are onto it, lazy. I have read several Louise Penny mysteries, and while somewhat well constructed, they are all the same down to the croissants. From that point of view, but no other, they remind of Patricia Cornwell’s work. Both could use some strong editorial supervision, despite enormous popular success. Hard to believe, but apparently so, that both a critically applauded. Where is James Cain?
September 18th, 2021 at 10:33 pm
It’s cookie cutter success, Barry. Nothing more. And nothing less.
September 19th, 2021 at 2:51 am
Yeah Steve, it’s cookie cutter, but it’s still Success, while I languish among the Great Unread.
September 19th, 2021 at 10:43 am
The other side of cookie cutter success. That was Barry’s complaint back in 1995, and in that regard, nothing has changed. Wouldst it be otherwise.
September 19th, 2021 at 11:49 am
I believe the success of these things, whether cookie-cutter or not, is related to theatrical timing. The Cornwell stories are fairly well plotted and compellingly sexy. Louise Penny’s work came along at a time when the ‘snowflake’ persona was in fashion. Otherwise, they would probably be published, but would not be in anyone’s conversation.
September 19th, 2021 at 2:02 pm
‘ppreciate the kind word
It’s a disturbing topic (that language, learning, literacy, books, and journalism are in such trouble).
But since so many don’t see it as a problem, it’s hard to preach thunderous jeremiads about it. Consumers will buy what they wish, regardless.
Me, I’d never turn my back on the education which made my life possible. Without books, I’d be living in a cardboard box on a sidewalk somewhere.
What will future citizens resemble, now that we’ve turned to this unstable alternative? yikes. Probably more of what we saw this past January.
Anyway yes Border’s was a wonderful venue. Live music, arts’n’crafts nights, lecture series, book-signings. Communications hadn’t yet been ruined. Taking a hot date to Border’s …always a good time. Sigh. People were cuddly then; not treacherous and robotic, like today.
September 19th, 2021 at 7:52 pm
I went to the nearby Barnes & Noble this afternoon, the first time in several months. Very gratifying to see that the children’s section was very busy, but for me, I didn’t see a single book that tempted me, especially in the mystery section. Everything that Barry had to say about the selection available was even more true today than it was then.
A couple of SF novels looked interesting, but they were so thick I couldn’t lift them.
September 19th, 2021 at 9:25 pm
I swear the last ten novels by Daniel Silva not only all have the exact same plot, but the same damn Mercedes Maybark on the exact same page. Shades of S. S. Van Dine introducing the murderer on the same page and same paragraph in every Philp Vance novel.
But there are several good writers and interesting series that aren’t cookie cutter available, just not by the usual suspects.
September 27th, 2021 at 2:07 am
Maybe Bill Pronzini and Max Allan Collins ought to get together and write the ultimate hard-boiled mystery!
September 27th, 2021 at 2:11 am
Spot on about Louise Penny – so slow and samey – a sort of poor (wo)man’s Fred Vargas. I wonder what Penny’s new one in collaboration with Hillary Clinton will be like.