I took a friend of mine for a spin through the Seattle Mystery Bookstore yesterday. He’s a reader who needed a book and I had to keep him away from the hole in the street in front of the store now in its seventh month of continuous operation. Pretty soon GM Ford or Earl Emerson will have to feature this dig in one of their novels. I thought the trip through the aisles revealed much about the state of our crime fiction union, so I’ll give you my impressions. Also Tod Goldberg needs something to read.
They had plenty of copies of Sara Gran’s novel, Dope. An impressive display near the front window, right on the pub date. Lee Goldberg, Dana Stabenow, Andrew Vacchs, Michael Connelly and Barbara Serenella had books on the front table; that’s an eclectic mix driven by an assortment of award nominations, personal appearances fore and aft, and the store’s own quirks. Robert Ferrigno’s latest Prayers for the Assassin caught my eye. He’s a home boy.
I rescued Tim from the cat mystery section and we plied through a John Connelly, Ken Bruen, Jason Starr section; as a civilian, Tim was unable to recover from the cat stuff. Yes, as far as I know these cats solve mysteries. I don’t know how they do it. Then we discovered that William Brodrick’s The Sixth Lamentation was out of print. Our last stop was the SoHo crime display. He’d read Rebeccca Pawel’s Death of a Nationalist but we couldn’t locate her newest book. On the way out I looked for releases from Hard Case Crime. Then the jackhammers began once more.
At lunch he’d been telling me how crazy his business has become. Book publishing has its travails, but so does banking, insurance and the restaurant biz. Crime fiction isn’t suffering from a dearth of talent. Even a specialty shop grapples to define what a mystery is, what might appeal to whom, and why. The breadth of choice is daunting, the categories vague to the unitiated. I didn’t solve the mystery of what sells and what languishes, but I worry that gimmicks will backfire if the writing becomes secondary to high concept titles that do not deliver the goods. That’s a tough hole to climb out of.