At the LA Times, I use my unabashed love for Iain Sansom's Mobile Library novels (THE CASE OF THE MISSING BOOKS is genius and the new one, THE BOOK STOPS HERE, is just as good) as a means of talking about crime novels that are light on gore and violence:
In the August issue of Paste magazine, Peter Langness praised what he termed "blanc fiction" -- crime novels with a lighter tone that concentrate their narrative efforts on mining the human condition. Though his primary example of Colin Cotterill's "The Curse of the Pogo Stick" (Soho Press: 272 pp., $24) doesn't quite fit (some of the crimes, even offstage, border on the bizarre and bloodthirsty), Langness scores more accurate points praising "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" novels of Alexander McCall Smith: Crimes of any kind (let alone murder) hardly figure in the internationally bestselling series, eight books and counting. "We are not here to solve crimes," Precious Ramotswe, the Botswanan "lady detective" in question, indignantly tells a potential client. "We help people with the problems in their lives."
The term "blanc fiction," then, implies a sense of community between the reader and the books' characters. It might even be a better term for what's now called "cozy" mysteries, in which a crime's commission, detection and resolution recede into the background in favor of the protagonist's idiosyncrasies, whether on a personality, professional or social level. Or, shrugging off complex reasoning, these books aim to make the reader smile, to sip metaphorical bush tea for a few hours and forget troubles in order to get happy -- even on a temporary basis...
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