A discussion has been raging in my head. I would say argument, but I’m not really arguing with myself, instead I’m just trying to nail down my novels genre. I say raging because as much as I tell myself to stop thinking about it . . . to stop worrying about it, the more I think about it.
One of the other writers in a group the other day asked why I would call my manuscript a cozy mystery but then compare its style to Dick Francis. He, a former manger of Murder by the Book in Houston, said that Dick Francis has always been known as a thriller writer. Personally, and I’ve never been a book store manager so there is a significant loss in credibility, I’ve never considered Francis a thriller writer. Vince Flynn, Robert Ludlum, Dan Brown; these are thriller writers in my mind and I’ve always categorized them that way for one simple reason, the presence of a deadline.
This fellow in the group clumped thriller writers based on the amount of gore involved in the murder. That seems more ambiguous than my deadline parameter. I found an article by Vickie Brittion where in she describes the elements of a Cozy Mystery.
• no explicit sex
• no gore or violence
• no graphic language
• amateur sleuth
• centers around a puzzle or whodunnit
• local setting
Wikipedia defines thrillers as “often overlap with mystery stories” and “in a thriller the identity of a murderer or other villain is typically known all along.” So based on that I’m right both about my novel and about Dick Francis. Then this sentence comes along: “While a mystery climaxes when the mystery is solved, a thriller climaxes when the hero finally defeats the villain, saving his own life and often the lives of others.”
Anyone who has read any Dick Francis novels can see in that last sentence how every single Francis novel fits that mold.
Despite all this, the one thing that irked me, if only because it was so misogynistic, was the fellow didn’t think my novel was a cozy mystery becase I was a guy writing it, my hero was a guy, and it dealt with fitness and exercise as a theme, something he termed generally male themes.
So, for my next novel, based on this fellows thoughts, I either have to plan on keeping my style of writing, but finding a theme like knitting, and write from a female point of view, or make the mystery more sweeping, have the killer’s identity known, and produce a hard and fast time line and turn it into a thriller. Who knew there was such pigeon holeing done in the world of publishing?
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