It’s getting awfully hard to be optimistic these days

by Rick Blechta

No need to amplify much on the title of my post. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past, say, two years, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Not having been alive during the 1930s, I can’t say for certain, but I’ll bet any number of citizens of the world felt much as we do now during Hitler’s rise to power. Regardless of what camp you’re in, you’ve got to be feeling a lot of apprehension right now. Everything has changed and the unrest is only beginning.

But Type M is not about politics, so let’s move the conversation, shall we — but not too far.

Over the next few years, I can’t help but think that we’re going to see a lot more plots with terrorism, racial strife, government spying and the like at their centre. Most of these will be thrillers which by their nature often have plot elements like this.

But I also see a new subtext spreading into other sub-genres of crime writing. Police procedurals are a natural setting. Will it even affect cozies, or will the writers of cozies batten down the hatches to allow readers to be “not so much in this world” for a little while? Or will they, too, find ways to weave in current events/world political tensions into their plots?

I think the world of crime fiction is about to get a lot more interesting. And that’s something to be optimistic about, isn’t it?