Convergence of Terms

I could blame this essay on Bouchercon, or on Ed's post as a result of the convention. But really, the idea has been germinating my head for a while, mostly as a variant on the theme of "cozies are the new pulp." But then it went away before I could really develop the idea.

Then I started thinking about romance. And categorization. And how it might be an interesting idea to apply romance-friendly terms to the crime fiction world. And suddenly things started making more sense.

For those who read romance (I stopped years ago, mostly because I loved mysteries more and it stuck) there are two broad streams of books: category and single title. The former is "categorized" by "a specific brand name, such as Harlequin Presents, Silhouette Desire or Silhouette Intimate Moments. Their covers look similar and they are sold together in a packaged line. Each line has certain common elements, such as the level of sensuality or the level of mystery. Word count is generally about the same but can differ greatly from line to line." The latter is "one that stands alone on the shelf without being part of particular line. This type of romance may stay on the shelf and in print much longer than a category."

Sound familiar? It sure does to me. Which is why I'm intrigued by the possibility of using the term "category mystery" instead of the dependable cozy, hardboiled, noir, etc. Because it doesn't really matter what the trappings are, the end result (which I'll try to develop in more detail) is the same:

A mystery novel is either category or single title.

It is by no means a direct comparison, but for argument's sake, let's pretend that the role of Harlequin will be played by St. Martin's Minotaur, which publishes approximately sixty mysteries a season. Of late, they have designated four titles each season as their breakout titles - the ones that have considerable marketing muscle behind them and a greater chance at "breaking out" and staying in print much longer than SMP's usual titles. So in other words, for the spring season, Marcus Sakey's THE BLADE ITSELF, Val McDermid's THE GRAVE TATTOO, Marc Lecard's VINNIE'S HEAD and Dana Stabenow's A DEEPER SLEEP are your flagship single titles.

What about the rest?

Well, one can divvy them up into specific, well, categories. Cozy? Check. Hardboiled? Check. Noir? Check. Chicklit? Check. Historical? Check. PI? Check. Regional? Check. Erotic? Not really, but that category is amply taken care of by other publishing houses. Point is, most of the remaining titles SMP will publish each season are bought for similar advances, have small, hardcover-only print runs, a tightly defined market, a somewhat narrow margin of creativity (insofar as category constraints are not necessarily chafed at) and will cycle on bookshelves for approximately three to four weeks before making way for the new crop.

So that I'm not just picking on Minotaur here, Berkley Prime Crime is another great example of category at work. They've subdivided things even further, focusing primarily on the cozy side of things with "insert topic here" mysteries. But all of them, of course, are category: knitting, chocolate, baking, figure skating, are they not topics with particular categories, specific niche markets and the like? And on the opposite spectrum, Hard Case Crime is unabashedly category, even going so far as to emulate Harlequin - and the old pulp fiction lines, too - with their insignia, specific word count limits and ethos. HCC gets all the ink and Berkley Prime Crime or NAL doesn't, but in the end, they are equal:

They are category.

So what, then, is single title? Well, it's not just a case of a standalone novel, though that's probably the easiest marker of such. It's a book that moves past category constraints, which has something to keep it on bookshelves a little longer, keep it in print beyond the old one-a-month cycle (which is now more like one-every-two weeks, if that.) They are the books that get cherrypicked by PW's fiction section instead of the mystery one; they are the books that hit bestseller lists and sometimes stay there forever. They are the books that others deign to say "transcend genre" when all they really do is step up a notch in terms of bigness, the quality of the writing, the scope of topic, the heightened stakes.

Mind you, category vs. single title should not be conflated with good vs. bad. Donald Westlake is, to my mind, the absolute King of Category, but Elmore Leonard went from category to Single Title. So, too, did Lawrence Block. Mary Higgins Clark is Single Title but Carol Higgins Clark is pretty much in category. Robert B. Parker might have done a reverse; start in single title but move down to category (though the particular category, in this case, is Spenserism.) Dennis Lehane started off in category, barely, but is so firmly single title that he's leaving the genre behind completely - a trajectory he'd been headed in since day one.

The debut novels that get the big bucks are, by and large, single title. Sometimes category makes it, but that's because there's enough of an indication that the author is going to move up the ranks fairly soon. And sometimes a book that might seem to be category on the surface (Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, perhaps) are just massive bestseller single titles waiting to happen, patience notwithstanding.

Think about this: maybe when Otto Penzler does his yearly anti-cozy rant, what he's really doing is disdaining category mystery in favor of single titlehood. Which may be cause for alarm, but then, are romance enthusiasts trying to equate their own category and single title books?

I'm not so sure.

And if so, maybe the mystery world is drawing genre lines in the wrong places.

Comments

[Bryon Quertermous]

Another way to look at this is in one column you have the books with the "mystery" category on their spine and in the other you have "novels" or "suspense." But I completely agree with your claim that the prejudice seems to be against category mysteries more than just cozies.

That seems to be the major complaint among mystery fans about the Penzler guided Best American Mystery Stories series. There seems to be a signifigant lack of "category" mystery stories while containing almost entirely "single title' stories.

[Ingrid (I.J.Parker)]

I'm depressed. Surely things are not that cut and dried. Category is just about the last thing I would want to be writing. I used to believe that a series -- any series -- could rise above merely providing a new instalment of the same old thing at regular intervals. There is, for example, that wonderful opportunity for watching a character grow over a lifetime.

[Daisy]

That's a good point. I wonder, since we're doing the genre mash, how the scifi/fantasy model for a series might fit in here? That is, a continuing series of books with the same characters and self-contained plots, that move through a larger story to some final resolution. Or is that not what mystery readers are looking for?

[Steve Allan]

I wonder if we should continue to further strengthen the concrete barriers within the genre. I think the categorization walls should be made of Jell-O, rather than cement - and then, the wall should be about three feet high, so they can be hurdled that much easier. I personally believe in an ideal literary world where a book can settle anywhere in literature without worry of being labelled - OK, that's a very naive and Utopian idea, but one can hope. But then again, I may be alone in this thinking. I've encountered so many "unenlightened" literary snobs that my views on the subject could be influenced out of that continous battle that crime fiction deserves the respect of the lit fic crowd. The obvious argument in that fight is for the demolish of those genre walls. Then again, I could just be rambling here. Not the first time. Your mileage may vary.

[ed gorman]

It'll take me a while to decide if I ultimately agree with you or not--though I suspect I will--but whatever my conclusion you've just written the single most interesting piece on the business of mystery fiction that I've read in twenty years. One thing to note, Harlequin has been off 4% in sales for the past few years. Be interesting to know what they'll do next. Thanks again for a fine, fascinating essay.

[John Rickards]

It's an interesting way of dividing up the market - and certainly makes as much, if not more, sense than just the straight subgenre brackets we normally use, certainly for those books which seem impossible to pin down to one particular type. "It's a psychological noir police thriller. About a cat."

That said, it also sounds very much like the old division between "pulp" and big-time fiction, very much so. A kind of cyclical, back to the roots kind of thing.

[Charles Ardai]

The points you make are good ones, and I've wrestled with this question myself from time to time, but...I don't know. As a reader (not as a publishing insider or bookseller, but as someone choosing a book to read), I'd find it more useful to be told whether a book is "hardboiled" or "cozy" than whether it's "category" or "single-title." The former tells me a lot about what sort of fiction it is -- what the tone, situations, style, and story are like -- which has a significant impact on whether I'm likely to enjoy it. Some people like stories of coy septuagenarians solving mysteries while puttering around in their gardens and some don't; some enjoy cute cats and some don't; some enjoy despairing trips into the gutter and some don't. I enjoy all three (believe it or not), but if I'm in a cat mood I don't want the gutter and vice versa, so being told "this is a cute cat cozy" or "this is a gutter-scraping noir" is useful to me in the same way that a movie review that tells me whether "Tootsie" is a comedy or a documentary about podiatrists is.

On the other hand, knowing that a book is "category" vs. "stand-alone" generally only tells me something about the degree of confidence its publisher has in it, and sometimes not even that. (For example, as you noted, at Hard Case Crime we publish all our titles in identical category format -- but clearly that doesn't mean that the books are assembly-line schlock thrown into the market just to feed the distribution machine for a few weeks. Incidentally, I don't know that it's true that category titles remain in print for a shorter time than single-title books. I was talking with Jack Ketchum the other day, and he was raving about how Dorchester -- the publisher that handles Hard Case Crime's distribution, and very much in the "category" category -- has kept all his titles in print for years now. I don't know if the same is true for Harlequin, for instance, but I do know that every book Hard Case Crime has ever published is still in print and still selling.)

Are "single title" books always non-series? Clearly not -- just look at the example you gave of Lawrence Block, all of whose books over the past twenty years (except one, SMALL TOWN) have been series books.

Are single-title books always (or even generally) of higher quality than category books? I don't know; maybe a bit, on average, but lord knows I remember reading a ton of awful single-title books the year I judged the Edgars. Also a ton of awful category books, of course, but I don't know that the single-title books were dramatically better at the median. They were just bad in different ways.

The single-title books tended to be longer, and "bigger" in terms of story conception (you could imagine them being made into feature films rather than TV series on some little-watched cable channel), and often they were more ambitious...but better? Well, okay, if pressed I'd say a slightly larger fraction of them were outstanding, but we're just talking about 1% vs. 0.1% -- yes, that's an order of magnitude, but it still means that a person picking titles to read in a bookstore is dramatically more likely to grab a bad one than a good one if choosing blind.

I am not at all against the "category" vs. "single-title" distinction being used, but I don't think it's a substitute for a distinction based on (sub-)genre or tone or content. Yes, dividing DVDs into "Comedies" and "Westerns" means you don't know where to shelve "Blazing Saddles," but that doesn't mean it's not a useful thing to do.

[Charles Ardai]

By the way, I realize that you wrote "category vs. single title should not be conflated with good vs. bad" -- just to clarify, I don't mean to imply you suggested otherwise. That said, I think that this is one way many (most?) people would interpret the "category" vs. "single-title" distinction -- and while they wouldn't be entirely wrong to do so, I think it could leave some excellent books out in the cold and some unsuccessful ones given an undeserved presumption of quality.

[Ingrid (I.J.Parker)]

Thank you, Charles Ardai. My thought exactly.

[Sarah]

Lots of food for thought here (keep it coming!) but just want to address what's already on the table. First, Charles, you're absolutely right that the reader wants more specificity in looking for a book, and category/single title designations won't help in that regard. But perhaps having a broader term that encompasses all these subgenres - one that's easily remembered and not so amorphous - might help things. It's like, why do some agents say they don't represent mysteries but they will take on crime novels or thrillers? It's category vs. single title. Why do some books end up shelved in the mystery section and others in the fiction section? Category vs. single title (well, in theory; in practice it's often different.)

The other thing, in thinking more about it, is that perhaps category/single title explains why some writers get dropped by their publisher. Because if two or three books isn't enough to get sales going, there's someone else who will come along (and who, perhaps, comes cheaper or "fresher" or what have you) to fill the supposed slot on the category front. But once in single title, there's a lesser chance of being let go. I'm generalizing, and this needs much more investigation, but it's intriguing to me...

[Laura]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't "category" thinking helped to make romance-writing less collegial? When you start thinking in slots, it's tempting to see every writer as competition. I once heard a story (perhaps apocryphal) that an attendee at RWA expressed out-loud the lovely wish that a plane might go down, opening up more slots.

Not an argument for or against, just an acknowledgment of what might happened.

[David Thayer]

Sarah, Wow, this is a huge topic. Torstar, Harelquin's parent company, continues to struggle, reducing staff and eliminating category lines. That's the effect. The cause may lie at the heart of your essay, that a qualitative divide exists and readers know it. Michael Blowhard had a recent post about the seven steps of selling a manuscript, step one being author to agent. If lit agents are the gatekeepers, first readers, their commercial instincts will guide them toward the path of least resistance, ie category fiction. Mystery is already in jeopardy but crime fiction beyond category seems to be on a different trajectory although much more difficult to push through those seven points of sale.

[Barbara Peters]

Re Categories, as a bookseller 20 years in, and a former librarian, I note

Categories are always more exclusive than inclusive for no two people categorize the same. That's why even Dewey Decimal is subject to local interpretation. If I had my way, as in fact I do at The Poisoned Pen, I'd treat it all as fiction. I often amuse myself when traveling to hit other bookstores and see what they do with shelving, chains and indies, and guess what: not one has ever shown me categorization that works for me. I expect most authors prefer that their books find readers without this benefit but that's probably an unrealistic hope in a world where handbookselling is increasingly rare. I am always relieved to come home where for now I get to handle our bit of the bookselling universe in a fashion uniform to all writers of fiction. That does of course require that our staff and I read the books which is a luxury increasingly rare for those in the bookworld. I often wonder if we've lost any ability to stay in the moment but are always accelerating on to the next and thus more in need of sign posts than ever.

And now off to haul books to Mr Cussler to sign whose work is never called mystery anywhere but in The Poisoned Pen but wanders around into fiction and seafaring and naval history (all valid).

[Peter]

I confess that the category-single title debate has me scratching my head. Is it more meaningful to publishers and booksellers than it is to readers?

On the other hand, I find something reassuring about "category" covers -- Penguin classics, say. (I think French publishers have traditionally favored uniform or near-uniform covers for lines of books more than American publishers have. A product of the a culture that is more heavily centralized than ours, perhaps?)

The format can work especially when the "category" format is attractive, as is the case with Hard Case's covers. I must admit, though, that I had trouble finding much in common between Say It With Bullets and Grifter's Game. (I liked both, though not as much as I liked Bust.)

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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

[Brian Thornton]

Just a thought from someone who has non-fiction stuff out there, and who is an unabashed mystery reader as well as a mystery writer.

My non-fiction piece on Abraham Lincoln is absolutely biographical in nature, and yet I found it at the largest local "indie" bookstore in my home region shelved in the history section. This would be akin to putting Agatha Christie in the true crime section, as far as I'm concerned: related fields, certainly, but not the same thing.

When I politely asked the bookstore staff why it was shelved where it was, I got condescencion and a remark that, "It's shelved appropriately, sir." (For what it's worth, I'm one of those authors who absolutely stands by the idea of going out of your way to *NOT* alienate bookstore sales staff).

Another case in point: I was in a Waldenbooks lately, looking for David Liss' new book, and it was shelved in the mainstream novel section. Stamped right across the cover was the phrase: "by the Edgar award-winning author of.." The sales staff there had no idea what an Edgar was.

I mention both of these incidents because I think they illustrate how utterly unlikely it is or ever will be that mystery publishers will ever be able to successfully categorize their publications in the manner being discussed here.

While I have no doubt that this sort of attempt at "convergence" is on-going in the publishing business, it doesn't strike me as being something they can replicate from what the romance publishers themselves have done.

No doubt there are publishers and editors and who get all sorts of sweaty at the thought of being able to produce stories on a template/assembly line model from authors they're paying work-for-hire wages with no whiff of royalties, but I think anyone interested in actually trying to pull this sort of thing off (and it seems the logical end-point of this conversation about publishing trends) is acting without considering the immutable fact that people who read mysteries don't necessarily want the comfort-food-as-literature fare that sits between the covers of most of the template romances.

Put simply: romance readers seem to know what they want, and they seem to frequently provide a business' dream consumership: they want the same thing over and over again.

While there are obviously mystery readers who are like that, most of the ones I know (and I'm thinking of a number of fans I spoke to last weekend at Bouchercon) tend to read pretty widely in the mystery canon. I spoke to a woman in the book room who had a copy of Duane Swiercynski's THE WHEELMAN, something by Jenny Siler, and Kat Richardson's GREYWALKER in hand, either already purchased or ready to buy them. And that's just one example.

I'm not saying that knowing your target base isn't important. I'm also not saying that this sort of thing isn't happening. What I am saying is that I'm not sure how successful it is, since it's pretty difficult for publishers to ensure equality of placement (when the people who work in bookstores tend to make around 8-10 dollars per hour) and equality of exposure, and equality of response from the readership.

After all, how do you even go about quantifying the results, aside from looking at total sales, and there are usually obviously a variety of factors involved in that final outcome as well.

Your Mileage May Vary-

Brian

PS to Sarah- sorry I didn't get a chance to talk to you at Bouchercon. If you're coming to Left Coast Crime, I'd love to buy you a pint of one of our local micros.

[Peter]

Brian: I take second place to no one in my scorn for the dopes who work at too many bookstores http://www.loveofreading.com/forum/toast.asp?sub=show&action=posts&fid=1&tid=5 , but I have some sympathy in the case of David Liss. Talk about a writer who defies categories. Does he write crime? Mainstream fiction? Historical fiction?

My favorite example of stupid shelving involves a memorable essay James Baldwin wrote about attending a conference in Europe with leaders from all over Africa and realizing then how different he was from them, how truly American he was. But could I find that essay in literature at my local Borders, or even in American studies or history? It was, after all, one of the profoundest statements ever written about being an American, yet it was shunted to the African American studies section. Granted, there may have been all kinds of reasons for this. But even an enlightened manager who wanted to stick Balwin smack in the mainstream, where he belongs would have been unable to do do. Borders corporate policy, I was told, dictated what was shelved where.

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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

[Stacey Cochran]

I've been somewhat skeptical of categories and genres my entire career. I understand them from a marketing point of view, and accept that that's the way things are done.

I've tried time and time again through the course of writing nine novels to write a novel that includes every genre possible (literary, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, action/adventure, comics, romance, YA, Western, etc.), and to do it in a way that it is cohesive.

What I've found is no one gives a damn.

When a query/pitch reaches an editor or agent's desk, they want to be able to quickly assess what they have in front of them. That makes total sense.

It becomes a kind of "Does this writer speak my language?" where the in-groups of writers (and agents) know what a publisher wants and delivers it. And the out-group?

Gets rejected.

You have to find a way to work within the system, to "speak the language" of a particular house.

It's true. You've just got to know the particular language of a particular publisher, editor, and literary agent, (and reviewers and readers), and then line them up and deliver a product that they can shake their heads and agree on.

This is one of ours.

Stacey

[ro715ck]

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