At around fifteen months, children start wanting to sort things: the blue bricks here, the red bricks over there. Putting a red brick in with the blue collection will provoke either a reproving look while the naughty brick is put back where it should be, or a screaming tantrum. You just have to ask yourself, 'Do I feel lucky?' before you risk doing it.
It's not only children. There was an orangutan called Alexander in Edinburgh Zoo many years ago; he was such a character that a statue of him still stands in the grounds. He liked watching TV — westerns preferred — and he had no hesitation in giving the finger to any visitor to whom he took a dislike. At feeding time he would be given a whole heap of bread, greens and fruit and every day before he started to eat, he would sort them.
The bread and greens were pushed aside in separate heaps. Then he would sort the chopped fruit — bananas, grapes, oranges, apples — and eat them in that order, only working round to the greens when they were all gone and lastly the bread, eaten with an air of resignation.
The day we were there, watching with some fascination as he did this, a rogue piece of orange had managed to conceal itself among the bread. He looked at it in dismay and then, yes, had a toddler tantrum.
So sorting like with like seems to be an atavistic impulse and perhaps it's not surprising that books are subject to categorizing. It starts with genre fiction/ literary fiction. Then genre divides into chick lit/ romance/ crime. Then crime offers up a multitude of choices.
Crime writing has always been a famously a broad church which suits me, but it seems that now there is a determination to divide it into an ever-increasing number of neat little subsets. A spot of research came up with the following:
Cozy. Mystery. Hard-boiled. Private Eye. Legal thriller. Police Procedural. Medical thriller. Forensic thriller. Historical. Suspense. Military thriller. Whodunit. Spy thriller. Caper — often involving animal detective. Howcatchum ( a new one on me, this). Noir — Scandi or Tartan. Fantasy. Dystopian, even!
You may well be able to come up with more. But even with all this to chose from, I find it hard to work out where I would place my own books. There are some categories I can definitely rule out — private eye, caper, historical, medical. Oh, and dystopian. Definitely not dystopian.
Certainly they're police procedural, but does the fact that I don't use the more dramatic obscenities and feature DI Fleming's family background tip me into cozy, even though some of the forensics are quite explicit? And I got an email from a reader just today saying he'd been kept awake all night to finish my latest book, so that makes me suspense, I suppose. It's all very confusing.
Publishers and booksellers like to be able to pop us into neat little pigeonholes on the assumption that this is what the public wants, that this makes it easier for the books to be sold on the 'if you loved that, you'll love this one.' I'm not convinced myself. Usually when I'm offered recommendations on this basis I'm merely puzzled because they seem not to have understood at all what drew me to the first book, perhaps the setting or the subject. I certainly don't read by category, however refined it may be, or write by category either. Do you?
Publishers are led by their marketing departments and their quest to make everything perfectly clear to booksellers. The sales force sent out to sell their "product" to these booksellers have to be able to clearly state in mere seconds what each particular book is about and where to place it in the store. Unfortunately, this has been taken to ridiculous lengths in our fast-moving society. Books that don't conveniently fall into any particular category usually quickly wind up getting sent back to the publisher and many times these books are perfectly good, but didn't easily fall into a preconceived category.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is the epitaph for anything that happens just to be a good book.
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