The first book I published, Before the Time Machine, was unapologetically literary fiction. It was dual timeline, completely character-focused, had no threaded plot, and featured serious themes.
But then I began to write historical mysteries, the Tommy Jones series, set in Victorian England. And immediately there was a problem.
The meta information for a book (needed for publishing, Library of Congress information, and marketing) requires the author to state a genre. Are Murder at Old St. Thomas’s, Murder at an Exhibition, Murder on the Pneumatic Railway, and my upcoming Murder at the Gasworks historical fiction? You bet. Are they in the mystery (also known as crime) camp? Also yes.
Once in the mystery category, there are subcategories. Are they cozies? A cozy doesn’t have graphic violence or sex. Check. It is usually discrete, one crime solved per book. Check. It has some light elements or humor. Check.
But historicals aren’t cozies, typically. So when I wrote a more typical light cozy mystery, Bummer at Luna Beach, I stopped referring to the historical mysteries as cozies. Instead, they are historical fiction, and traditional mysteries.
It got even more complicated when I published A Heart Purloined, a historical romance that was also a mystery. And possibly a cozy. But certainly a romance, with a rivals-to-lovers trope. The meta list was getting longer and more confusing.
Since my books have been available for a few years, I’ve had the opportunity to receive feedback from readers. I do not have a lot of readers. Historical fiction is not a popular genre at the moment, and people buy far more thrillers than traditional mysteries.
Historical romance is nowhere near as popular as it was when I was reading them avidly in the 1980s and 90s. And historical romance mystery? Not even on most readers’ radar. My best-selling book is the actual cozy with no genre waffling, Bummer at Luna Beach.
What I keep hearing is that my books, particularly the Tommy Jones Victorian mysteries, are differently written than most in the genre. They are more serious, less trauma-based, and better researched than many books that are written quickly and sell a lot. They have deeper themes and more developed characters. The typical mystery elements are there, and they are whodunnits (not why-dunnits), but they come off more like — dare I use the word? — literature.
That’s because my models were people like Anne Perry and P.D. James. At the time, they were considered mystery genre writers. But now, as I re-read their work, I believe their books would be reclassified as literary fiction, like Patricia Highsmith or Georges Simenon.
Why? I believe that in the last twenty years or so, what we call genre fiction (mysteries, thrillers, romances, etc.) has become increasingly lightweight in terms of literary expression. Perhaps because attention spans are shorter, people want a fast read. It doesn’t have to be short, just easy to read quickly. They want their emotions hit through trauma, rather than character depth. Trauma is a faster route to caring what happens to a character. When they love a book, they want more like it rather than something new. (As a reader, I got into this tangle myself reading authors like Kate Morton, who use recurrent themes in similar settings.) Also, many readers today demand a “twist”, and are unhappy if they don’t get one. My twists are more ribbon than braid.
In short (yes, I know it wasn’t), I’m considering thinking of my historical mysteries as literary fiction, at the other end of the table from cozy mysteries. If you’ve read my work, let me know whether you agree?
This is a tricky one, so I’m gonna take the easy part first: Yes, people can’t read as well as they could in the past (even the recent past.) Victorian children’s literature is waaaaay too sophisticated for many/most American adults now. Huckleberry Finn was a children’s book, as was Wizard of Oz. Neither of these would be given to kids today, and most adults would struggle mightily with them. Gulliver’s Travels was considered a children’s book, and now it’s taught in grad school. So yeah: most Americans read at a 6th-grade level or thereabouts. Before smart phones I think it was closer to 8th grade, so: progress!
The classification of your books is the tricky part. They’re not substantial enough to be literature–themes are not dominant (and at the same time concealed for the reader to suss out on their own); the characters are not developed as deeply as in literary fiction; there’s a lot of plot but not many pages, so they’re quick reads.
They don’t ask/require/expect contemplation from the reader, which is (from my perspective as a lit person) the central defining characteristic of literature: you pretty much have to think about it to really understand it; you can’t just…read it, like a newspaper, to get information.
I thought about After the Time Machine for weeks after I read it. There’s only two characters, and their relationship is so strange and nuanced and layered that they stayed in my mind for a long time as real people with complex personalities. The themes–mortality and time–were woven through the whole book, and these themes were neither simplistic nor obvious. Neither could be embroidered on a pillow.
Writers take years to produce a single work of literary fiction, because of all the heavy lifting to really develop characters and themes, whereas accomplished genre writers can crank out a book a year focusing on plot and all their characters are one-dimensional.
The audience for literature in America is probably less than the population of Montana. Genre writers sell gazillions of books once they break into the biz. Their books are the potato chips of fiction.
I can’t thank you enough for this comment, JMM, and I agree. The mysteries, however deep the themes, are simply not written like literary fiction in the classic sense. The historical slide in reading ability and comprehension doesn’t necessarily cause the literary genre, or the definition of literature, to shift downward accordingly.
What you’ve written here not only helps me define literary fiction more clearly, it also makes me want to write it again. Wrestling with themes through characters, rather than plot through characters, may be more intense but it feels worthwhile in a completely different way.