by

Robb White

Full disclosure:  I rarely read cozy mysteries nowadays.  I tried to read an Agatha Christie once when I was in my thirties, reached page twenty-five, paused, then tossed the paperback across the yard. Blasphemy, you might say, for anyone addicted to reading, especially detective fiction.

I think the British critic Edmund Wilson got it half-right back in 1945 when he asked “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?”  Wilson wasn’t attacking the cozy alone, however; he was indicting all mysteries from the malice domestic to the hardboiled. We know better now:  Hammett, Chandler, and Cain were artists of the written word who painted similar and very sordid worlds with their talented brushes.

It’s pointless to argue which is better.  The idea is that, like self-published novels uploaded to Kindle by 18-year-old wannabe Hemingways, the writing field is glutted and it is often hard to see good novels in the putrid swamp of bad ones. The notion that good books will rise to the top like cream is naive. I’ll resist the temptation to be crass by avoiding what could be obviously mentioned about what else rises. Ebook and self-publishing has changed everything. Enough said.  What does it have to do with a crime writer, if he or she is good enough to crack through to a wider readership, you say? My point is this:  put enough obstacles in front of anyone regardless of talent and you will stop that person dead. 

One other side effect of the cozy’s dominance in the mystery novel marketplace is that it shortchanges readers by steeping them like teabags in a false sense of verisimilitude. (I don’t trot that word out very often.)  It’s like the CSI syndrome that has made everybody a forensics expert while reinforcing the unrealistic notion that crimes get solved in an hour (minus the commercial breaks). I’ve never heard it spoken of, but I have often wondered whether edgy noirists who happen to be women are even more handicapped than men in the writing game.  After all, there’s a powerful expectation that women have to be obsessed with relationships rather than action—like the Twilight vampire series teen girls are so enamored of—and overly sensitive to a subset of particular themes, one of which has been in vogue since the seventies—namely, career women competing for acceptance in a man’s world.

Take British writer Lynda LaPlante’s Jane Tennison as a rare example of the best of this theme.  But even smart, tough-minded Jane Tennison would have a different set of obstacles to face in a modern police department.  Transplant her to America, and she’d have to fight the Affirmative Action Baby stigma as much, if not more, than suspicious male colleagues who assume every female colleague is just a secretary with a gun.  Sure, the die-hards of machismo and the dinosaurs of male camaraderie are still there—but their numbers are few and they’re dying off almost as fast as WWII veterans.  Many women would argue not fast enough, I know, but let’s accept the generalization that women protagonists don’t need to prove themselves as much as the previous generation.  Cinema has always been less hidebound as a medium and an art form, so we can see much more rapid progress women directors have made and are making in film today.  Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is more violent than Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, which is, by the way, obsessed with the Bradley Cooper/Chris Kyle’s character’s innermost feelings in the PTSD vein of the contemporary combat soldier.  But she started with a pretty good and violent vampire film, Near Dark (1987). 

One recent survey of crime fiction I’m aware of says that only one of five readers is a male.  Women have long dominated the readership of mysteries.  But even beyond that, you have a plethora of women in the publishing field, especially in the magic circle of New York publishing houses, in the top editorial positions who give the thumbs-up or down signal to the manuscripts.  It’s reasonable to assume that many dark, violent crime manuscripts languish in slush piles in the offices of the Big 5 (or Big 6) of New York high-rises because their staff comprises mainly young, privately educated women who disdain violence in fiction that male writers assume as their prerogative.  (A New York literary agent herself told me this in a phone conversation.) A woman writer who wants to go beyond Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta and get her protagonist dirty in a non-forensic setting would still be an anachronism.  (Cornwell has 23 in her Scarpetta series, which could prove me wrong, I realize.) While male detectives have evolved far beyond an effete Peter Wimsey, capering and twitting about in his rich-man’s bored idle luxury, Oh-I-think-I’ll-solve a-murder-today-tra-la, where is a similar evolution of women crime figures from Dame Agatha’s Miss Marple? Younger and sexier doesn’t mean better. 

Yet the appetite for the cozy is never sated—or at least long enough for something different to replace some of the worst excesses. I hope I’m not resuscitating the words male chauvinist pig into the conversation about literary detectives, but I’d like to offer a placebo for those women who, like me, a male writer who revels in the psychology of evil and violence in his fictional world, want to see a diminishing of the safer stereotypes such writers largely offer their readers because readers are like trained seals, too, in that they like and expect what we keep feeding them.  Best case (for me) is an abrupt end to the cozy, but that won’t happen.  Next best is a substitution of the worst excesses, the most unrealistic of the cozy’s many preferred clichés of plot, character, and setting, with something grittier and true r to life than crime-solving wives and their vacant-eyed or adoring husbands, clever aunts and pretty nieces, solo women in mid-life crises, divorcees and whatever other spawn of the familiar they issue from instead of the real world where good guys and girls (detectives) co-exist with very scary males (and some females) in their clumsy but, to the reader, fascinating pas de deux. Evil isn’t romantic; little girls will grow up and realize that when their “Twilight” days are over:  this is a hook-up, sexually active and rambunctious, violent, sexualized society.  That is what they’re being thrown into.  We can’t make the world safe for cowards to live in (the great Len Deighton said that) if we continue to blink in the face of the ugliest evil that surrounds us every day of our lives and affects us all. The cozy hasn't moved far past the small, picturesque town with friendly neighbors interacting with the detective. It isn’t that horror can’t come out of the ordinary; look at Scott B. Smith’s A Simple Plan (1998).

I’m not arguing for men and women writers to up the violence quotient in their fiction nor to stop avoiding “adult situations.”  My own private eye is a burnout alcoholic and you can’t get closer to a stereotype than that.  But work against the clichés, not with them.  Take sex, for example.  Sexual activity in cinema is almost always boring. I wish Hollywood would return to the days of letting the camera lens drift up to the bedroom window and dissolve.  To return to the written form in the cozy’s specialty:  I’d go for an easing up on the love interest factor; it isn’t always necessary to have two males (one cruelly handsome, one a tamed husband type) pull the female protagonist in two directions as if she’s the rope in a game of tug-of-war.  Cursing.  Women do it.  Follow any teenage girl down a high school corridor and your ears will crisp.  Or make a pass at a handsome guy—or even a beautiful woman just because she feels like it—or check out a Most Highly Rated ménage à trois on YouPorn. I can’t imagine Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum saying, “Fuck this case, I’m getting drunk today” or “I’m going to get a grinning devil tattoo on my ass.”  Women journalist have turned the corner easily; check out Ghettoside, a recent non-fiction work by Jill Leovy on the Compton murders of the previous decades.  Fascinating, tough, brilliantly depicted personalities and crisp writing far better than the worn-out efforts of the chosen few who dominate the New York Times bestseller lists month after month. 

Here’s where men and women writers both benefit:  those pyramid-sized slush piles on those New York City desks will shrink.  Fledgling writers who do offer something more creative than these fake mysteries will perhaps catch a potential publisher’s eye.  It’s more important than ever because of the hurdles facing writers.  Besides that train wreck of bad, unvetted novels growing higher every day (I am stealing this fine image from an editor at Grand Mal Press), there are the greedy vultures, the middlemen of the publishing industry seeking to scoop in with their wide nets the writers and offer their shiny, expensive wares like paid-for reviews from Clarion and Kirkus at $450 per copy.  I’ve seen sites offering “sell sheets” a middle-schooler with two left thumbs could design for prices ranging from $150 to $400.  Of course, every good and bad blogger has dozens of free books arriving weekly on his or her doorstep. They’ve even developed a kind of snobbery among themselves.  Some won’t touch a writer from a publisher non-approved by the MWA with a barge pole.  Every crime and mystery website (if it isn’t already a property of one of the big NYC houses) will promote your book with a thumbnail for a certain fee.  And if your book does manage to stagger through the gauntlet to the marketplace on its own with the help of a courageous indie publisher who actually believes in good writing for its own sake, there’s the stranglehold on the book stores and major book outlets who are financially punished if they even think about putting an indie-published novel alongside a James Patterson, Sue Grafton, or Dan Brown. 

Am I exaggerating the situation out of some sour grapes pique?  A little.  My four crime novels have barely had the oxygen to limp off their puny Amazon pages into the wider world where (I have to believe or I tell myself) readers do hunger for something better than the tepid fare they get dished out by the big chains.  But everyone who takes writing seriously as novelist or reader has to wonder what the 85-year-old Clive Cussler’s secret is.  (He’s not “mystery,” of course, but he’s a great example of the deadwood that rises to the top of the bestseller charts and remains there ad nauseam. When aged Clive finally pops his clogs and disperses a kingly fortune pegged at 80 million dollars to various parties and charieties, will his agent and publisher conspire with a team of “legacy” co-writers to have him stuffed and mounted somewhere so that the Dirk Pitt novels can continue? Women writers nowadays dominate the bestselling paperback and eBook lists.  That’s good progress. But help out those women writers who want to break the mold of the safe-and-sound cozy.  I’ve long been convinced there’s an intelligent, untapped audience of readers weary of the same thing in every series that diminishes itself as “light reading fare.” Camus’ The Stranger is a murder mystery in one sense.  Want to call that light reading?