Genre Is Not a Four-Letter Word: Satisfying and Subverting Reader Expectations

Thank you all for having me here this evening. It’s a pleasure and an honor. I’d especially like to thank Julie Chappell, who extended the invitation to me. Julie can’t be with us tonight, unfortunately, so I can speak with complete honesty about her. She’s a wonderful writer, teacher, colleague, and friend, and I hope I don’t let her down.

When I tell someone I write crime novels, I’m usually greeted with one of three facial expressions:

Expression #1: Wide eyes, raised eyebrows, big smile. As in, “That’s awesome!”

Expression #2: Knitted brows, nervous smile, rapid blinking. As in, “You know how to murder me and get away with it, don’t you?”

(I do know how, by the way.)

Expression #3: Chin lifted, nose pointed down at me, smug smile. As in, “Oh, for a moment I thought you were a real novelist.”

In some circles, that last reaction is not uncommon. When I was in graduate school, for example, a student submitted a short story to our workshop. The story was about a couple of guys who find a bag of money in the woods and go on the run from some other guys who want the money back. The workshop started and—I remember this very clearly—one of the other students pushed the story away like it was this weird smelly knot of hair and gunk he’d fished out of a clogged drainpipe, and he said, “This is a crime story.”

Well, my first idea, when I started planning this talk, was to fight that fight and make the case that crime stories (and so-called genre fiction in general) is worthy of serious consideration and study.

But I know this is an enlightened bunch. You read and teach writers such as Raymond Chandler and Megan Abbott and Georges Simenon and Patricia Highsmith and Walter Mosely and Viet Nguyen. You believe that there’s good fiction and there’s bad fiction, there’s literature and there’s product, and a crime novel—like any other novel—can be set down on either side of the ledger.

So then I started to consider the Deep Thoughts that I might have about crime fiction. What’s the source of its universal appeal? What does it tell us about the dark corners of our own minds and hearts? Et cetera.

But the problem, I have to admit, is that I don’t really have any Deep Thoughts. I’m the kind of writer who has to focus on the nuts and bolts of what I’m doing. Voice. Character. Plot. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, I have to stare for a long time, often an embarrassingly long time, before I understand what I’m seeing. In essence, I’m always trying to write a novel smarter than I am.

For your sake and mine, then, I’m not going to attempt any Deep Thoughts tonight. Instead I’m going to talk about crime fiction, and so-called genre fiction in general, in the only way I can talk about it with any confidence or enthusiasm or expertise: from the perspective of a writer, one writer, for whom an understanding of genre—of conventions and expectations—is crucial.

For several years I made my living mostly as a working-class Hollywood screenwriter. I got paid, but not millions, which means I had to go up for a lot of different kinds of writing assignments.

Here’s what happens in a typical meeting with a producer. She’ll say, “Hey, Lou, so we’ve got this project we need a writer to tackle—it’s a light romantic comedy or psycho-sexual thriller or inspirational family sports drama or animated action-adventure set in a dystopian future where giant harpy eagles have enslaved mankind. Would you be into something like that?”

And I’ll say, “Are you kidding me? You won’t believe this, but I have been passionate my entire life about psycho-sexual thrillers or inspirational family sports dramas or animated action...