David Thayer

Wellington Leg: January Magazine will run its year end crime fiction feature wherein various contributing editors offer five mini reviews for the year end round up. Your reporter is among the contributors but the advantage of numbers is obvious in this case: more thoughts about more books broadens the horizon far beyond my limited view. Entire publishing programs escape my notice but I have a sense of what’s happening on on the crime writing front.

2007 came and went without much distinction from 2006; the pressure on the genre comes from within as the ranks expand to include novels from many other sub-genres. Like a mad stock boy marketing types want their releases on Aisle Nine: Crime. We’re turning into Whole Foods when crime fiction is suited to the unadorned aisles of Soviet Food Store Number Four where shoppers bring their desperation with them and ambiance is just the French word for cured concrete.

This gentrification process started long ago and it is not a terrible thing. There are now rules for the genre, so many rules that any sort of instant replay would consume hours. That’s okay if authors break those rules but it’s tough to misbehave and be rewarded.

Our genre is broader than ever but flatter too, more gently reassuring than mind expanding. The high point of 2007? David Peace’s TOKYO YEAR ZERO. The low? Chelsea Cain’s HEARTSICK, a novel that most resembles a sleek new product rolling off a spotless assembly line.

The truth is some percentage of books published in a given year are completely forgettable. Publishing cycles last far longer than twelve months, given the lead time required to produce a book. That’s why 2007 is submerged by trends that emerged a few years ago. If you remember the motion picture PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE alien invaders tried to resurrect the dead in order to slaughter the living but forgot that zombies, whatever their good qualities, are really hard to govern. The newly dead consumed the newly arrived, the alien invaders themselves, whose commander resembled Rudy Giuliani in a Nehru jacket.

In analyzing crime fiction I have to ask: where have all the zombies gone?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 8:21 am and is filed under Crime Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.