If we are what we read . . . I'm a work-in-progress, by Catriona

Q: What are your most and least favoured sub-genres of crime fiction. And, in both cases, why? Since it’s this time of year, is there anything you’re exhorting yourself to read more of?

Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to our new Minds, Eric and Harini.

Man, I thought this would be an easy post. (I'm scrupulous in not working out which questions I'll be answering before I dream them up, avoiding self-dealing, but I was pleased to see that I'd bagged the "reading genre" option this week.) All I had to do was look at what I read last year, divide it into sub-genres, then report.

Hm.

I stand by the method. It's like the time when I got a new doctor and, at the first consultation, he said "what did you eat yesterday?" and I said, "yesterday's not a good example of my diet" and he said "yeah, it is". Similarly, if you ask people what they read they might say "Oh, you know: Proust and restoration drama. Bit of Walter Scott after supper". But if you ask them what's on their bedside table (US nightstand) you find out about the celebrity memoirs and biblio-romance. (Paul O'Grady and Jenny Colgan, if you're looking for recommendations, by the way.)

Despite that, I still expected that the hard numbers would reveal what I believed to be true about my crime-fiction reading. Which is: a lot of psychological suspense, a smattering of procedural, not much historical or cozy, no noir to speak of, ditto espionage, and zero action thrillers.

Here's the truth:

• Five psychological suspense - only five? I feel like there are years I *wrote* five
• Eleven procedurals - slightly skewed by PJ Tracy, but still.
• Nine historicals - nine!
• Seven cozies - seven!
• Three noir - really jet black, bitter noir; the stuff that makes espresso look like cherry coke. And then some noirish stuff like Jonathan Ames and Lawrence Allan. 
• Four espionage - who knew? Not me.
• And an action thriller. I think. Ruth Ware's Zero Days, is the book. Look at it. That's a thriller, right?

I also read four or five paranormal or horror-inflected crime novels last year, all brilliant. And a few YA, which I would never claim to know much about, but which I have also never read a bad example of. 

Plus whatever Secret Identity, by Alex Segura is. (Anyone?) And Bookworm by Robin Yeatman. The closest I could get to a sub-genre for Bookworm is that it's whatever Oyinkan Brathwaite's My Sister the Serial Killer was.

My take-away from this exercise in trying to pin down what I read is that it's not driven by sub-genre. Some books I read because I was moderating a panel; some because I was writing a blurb; some because Kristopher Zgorski told me to (e.g. Christopher Carlsson's terrific Blaze Me a Sun (scandi noir); some because I will read every word Stephen King writes until and unless he stops, then I will wear a black veil; some because I'm a sucker for a found family, anything set in a bookshop, or "one last job"; some because how could you not pick (e.g.) this book up:

To turn to the second bit of the question. Nope. I don't exhort myself to read more or less of anything (see above, Proust v. Paul O'Grady). But I do sometimes, because of the lavish wealth of absoutely fabulous writing in our beloved genre, forget how much I love some of the subs and sub-subs until I pick up a book that reminds me. So, in September, I binged on all three of Robin Gigl's Erin McCabe legal thrillers which refreshed my love of courtroom dramas and made me resolve to find more in 2024. Ideally, I'm looking for a fourth Erin McCabe, but maybe there's more Lincoln Lawyer since I last looked, or maybe Lisa Scottoline will revisit Mary DiNunzio . . .

It's going to be a bumper year for reading crime again, certainly.

Cx