No Yum Yucking, by Josh Stallings

 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?

A: I am not a fan of the entire concept of fiction genres let alone sub-genres. They stem from an outdated way to organize a bookstore. Looking around my public library we have a fiction section that encompasses all fiction. It is a land where Catriona McPherson’s comic period novels and her darker thrillers live happily beside Terry Shames small town Texas police novels and Gabriel Valjan’s hardboiled books. It is kinda like this group of criminal minds here on the blog. No, it is exactly like us. A damn fine group of writers. Each different from the others, all of whom I respect and am proud to be counted as a member.

Speaking of which WELCOME to our new criminals, Eric Beetner and Harini Nagendra. I look forward to reading more about how they do what they do.

Back to genre. As young reader, or listener to my father’s reading, I didn’t ever think Winnie the Pooh, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, or Little House on the Prairie belonged on different shelves. They were all just books Pops read and we Stallings kids loved.

As a teenager finding my own taste in books I read Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson, Sherwood Anderson, S. E. Hinton, Chester Himes, Raymond Chandler, etc…. I didn’t need genre to discover books I loved. Discussing books with fellow readers I heard about what they liked and discovered what I did and didn’t like.

When I started writing books I admit I lost my way for a moment. I forced myself to read the crime books everyone was talking about, even when they weren’t my cuppa tea. I read sub-genre as a way to understand the conversation in the publishing community. I missed some books I would have loved by chasing this down.

I spent a large portion of my life working in movie marketing, I get why publishers want well defined boxes to shoehorn a book into. It makes life so much easier on the marketing team. “If you liked best seller X, you’ll love the debut novel by Y.” Selling books or movies on their own unique qualities is hard in a sound bite meme-o-matic driven world. 

Rant over, time to answer the question…

I just finished Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water. A book had my brother Lark not crammed down my throat I never would have read. Too much hype, NY Times bestseller, Oprah’s book club pick, AND it was 724 pages (or in dyslexic speak, it will take for-fucking-ever to get through.) It is one of my favorite reads of late. Heart felt, a multi generational tale about a time and place new to me. What is its sub-genre? Damned if I know. It linked in my brain with The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis. Multi-generational tales, is that a genre?

Oops. I thought I was done ranting….

My *favoured sub-genres of crime fiction for a long time were hardboiled. From Chandler to Crumley there are some top notch writers working in the field. It, like any other sub-genre also has its share of books that rely on tropes and negate real human behaviors. Hardboiled also can lean into over driven toxic masculinity.  

My least favoured were puzzle mysteries. “Chrystal couldn’t have done it because Hillbilly Bob was in the garden at five fourteen making out with Sideshow Clem.” I do see the elegance in good puzzles and solving them, but my brain is not wired to track time lines and such. Also I like why-done-its better than who-done-its. Simply personal taste. That said, a good novel is a good novel regardless of what shelf it sits on.

I underlined were because as a reader and a writer I am a work in progress. At this moment in my journey I am drawn to books that neither play with or against tropes. As I said earlier I want to be surprised. I love the feel of writers on a tightrope with no net in sight. There are so many wonderfully inventive writers out there working in crime fiction and horror and fantasy and… It gives me hope. 

My current WIP has me reading fiction and non-fiction from Ecuador, and down the rabbit hole I fall.        

*I am using the British spelling of favoured because it irritates my spell checker allowing me to snap back, “Not so fast smarty pants, it is spelled correctly, we’re just on the wrong side of the Atlantic.”

I am currently reading: The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and The Woman in The Shaman’s Body, by Barbara Tedlock, Ph.D.)