What is Crime Fiction? by Chris Longmuir
I was recently asked to adjudicate a competition for crime
stories, and the entries turned out to be a mixed batch. Some stories were a
good fit for the crime genre, but others were of a more general nature,
probably a better fit for the general or literary short story with a crime as
part of the plot.
It had me thinking again about the nature of crime fiction,
and what diffentiates a crime story from other types of story, even if they
include a crime. For the purposes of the competition I decided to use the
broadest, most basic definition which was a short story which included a crime.
However, my mind kept ticking over on the conundrum of what
constitutes crime fiction, and I recalled a similar problem when I was
researching for my nonfiction book CrimeFiction and the Indie Contribution.
What I found out when doing this research was that
defining crime fiction was not such an easy task as I had assumed. Before I
started writing the book I thought I knew what a crime novel was. It had to be
a novel that featured crime, any kind of crime, from petty theft through to
murder, pulling in fraud and corporate crime along the way. That seemed logical
to me. But that was before I started trawling the internet for definitions of
crime fiction, and succeeded in confusing myself, and questioning whether I was
actually a crime writer.
The reason for my confusion arose from the many
definitions of what I thought was crime, appearing under the heading of
thrillers. A lot of the material referred to crime fiction as mystery, and the
definitions were related to what I would term the traditional mystery, the type
of story Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie might have written. This gives
the impression crime fiction has not moved on and has become stuck in the early
twentieth century.
A comparatively new and expensive addition to my
reference library, The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction, by
Joyce G. Saricks, does not even have a section on crime fiction. The nearest
categories she uses are Mysteries, Suspense, and Thrillers.
In her section on mysteries, Sarick’s considers they consist
of a puzzle, there are clues and red herrings, which she refers to as “attempts
to obscure some information”, and the reader as well as the detective is drawn
into the puzzle in an attempt to solve it. The crime usually involves murder,
and a body. Thrillers, on the other hand are action packed adventures and may
focus on other types of crime as well as espionage. Both, however, should be
gripping, plot centred stories.
My trawl of the internet did not reveal much in the
way of definitions for crime fiction. If I wanted to look at this genre, a
search for mystery was more successful. Thrillers brought many more results,
although a lot of the definitions were equally applicable to crime fiction. It
made me wonder whether crime fiction as a genre was being swallowed up by the
thriller genre. Or maybe this is a British, American thing, with the Brits
referring to the genre as crime fiction and the Americans using the thriller
genre. Certainly, many writers referred to as thriller writers I would have
termed crime writers. Authors such as, Ed McBain, Robert Crais, Michael
Connolly, Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs, and many more. I even found Agatha
Christie, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, listed as
thriller writers.
The Online Free Dictionary, defines thriller as “a
book, film, play etc., depicting crime, mystery, or espionage in an atmosphere
of excitement and suspense.” I could not find a definition for crime
fiction in the dictionary, but it defines murder mystery as “a narrative
about a murder and how the murderer is discovered.”
James Patterson, in the introduction to Thriller:
Stories to keep you up all night, writes that thrillers cover a wide
spectrum which he calls a literary feast, “The legal thriller, spy thriller,
action-adventure thriller, medical thriller, police thriller, historical
thriller, political thriller, religious thriller, high-tech thriller, military
thriller. The list goes on and on, with new variations constantly being
invented.” The thriller, therefore, seems to cover a great deal of ground.
But hang on a minute. In the middle of that list is the police thriller. Now
surely that must be crime fiction! Patterson goes on to say “By definition,
if a thriller doesn’t thrill, it’s not doing its job.” Well, at least I am
in agreement with him there.
By this time you will realize why I was starting to
question what kind of writer I am. I have always classed myself as a crime
writer, and I certainly fit the criteria of having a puzzle to solve in my
books. However, I am also an action writer and I like to use suspense to build
tension, and that fits more comfortably into the thriller category. So, am I a
crime writer or a thriller writer, or a mix of both?
Some of the information in this post has been taken
from my book Crime Fiction and the Indie
Contribution. If you are interested in seeing more examples of what I
uncovered in my research, it is in Chapter 6 – What is Crime Fiction?
In the meantime I have a load of crime story entries
to adjudicate, and I hope my selection of the overall winner, is a worthy one.
Chris Longmuir
Amazon
Apple iBooks
Comments
I look like my brothers; enough to suggest that we are all related, but not enough so that you'd inevitably guess it. So it is with genres. Crime novels may share a family resemblance, some more than others, but otherwise can be as dissimilar as any two members of a wide and diverse family.
Next, yes, you're describing a puzzling situation. OK, readers need to know what they're getting but all the categories you mention overlap in so many ways. The first book of mine that got a publisher interested was a thriller. They didn't want what they called 'stand-alone thrillers' at the time, though, so they asked if I'd write a police procedural. I did, they published it and, a few years down the line, the rewritten 'stand-alone thriller' was published as part of the same 'police procedural' series. These labels may help readers but they're a bugger for us at times.
That said, we do have to take care when assigning categories to our books, as you say. It can get very tricky on occasion...