{"id":5802,"date":"2016-06-23T06:57:22","date_gmt":"2016-06-23T10:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5802"},"modified":"2016-06-23T06:57:22","modified_gmt":"2016-06-23T10:57:22","slug":"who-writes-the-best-crime-novels-men-or-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5802","title":{"rendered":"Who Writes the Best Crime Novels: Men or Women?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"unmade

photo: Peter Lee, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

In the current issue of The Atlantic,<\/em> author Terrence Rafferty<\/a> has an intriguing piece titled \u201cWomen Are Writing the Best Crime Novels\u201d (in the \u201cCulture\u201d column, no less). Hmm. For real cultural insights, skim the article and read the comments.<\/p>\n

Rafferty attributes women authors\u2019 strength in this genre to the growing popularity of \u201cdomestic thrillers,\u201d the kind where your enemy sleeps next to you. Gone Girl<\/em> catapulted this resurgent genre to public attention. Theirs \u201cis not a world Raymond Chandler would have recognized,\u201d Rafferty says. His characters\u2019 motives were more basic (sex and greed) and their methods more direct. \u201cTake that, you punk!\u201d bang, bang<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Rafferty thinks Chandler\u2019s lone detective genre is almost as dead as the corpse in the dining room, though plenty of popular books are clear heirs to that tradition. The Jack Reacher series by Lee Child, the Tess Monaghan series by Laura Lippman, and the Strike\/Ellacott books of J.K. Rawlings (writing as Robert Galbraith) feature investigators working outside official channels. Their investigations are a bit hard to pull off in these technology-reliant days, but they can usually find a friendly cop to snag certain kinds of information for them. Cell phone logs and whatnot.<\/p>\n

As a person who reads a large number of books in the crime\/mystery\/thriller genre\u2014reviewing 46 in the past year for CrimeFictionLover.com<\/a>\u2014I can tell you there are some really tired tropes out there\u2014heroes with arcane martial arts skills, who know thirty-two ways to kill a person in two seconds flat, who get beat up but bounce back in record time, and who never met a woman they couldn\u2019t bed. A few of them also have a sense of humor.<\/p>\n

The \u201cgirl\u201d novels discard all that. Instead, they rely on astonishing levels of manipulation and the workings of the characters\u2019 minds, which Rafferty says often dwell on unresolved adolescent angst. A few years hence, those features will likely seem just as tiresome and overworked as the boy wonders. I laughed out loud reading this from one of the commenters on Rafferty\u2019s article: \u201cI think that after a certain number of introspective life years, the Self as object d’art is too debunked to stand much further scrutiny.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rafferty cites a bunch of female authors he admires, including Laura Lippman, Denise Mina, Tana French. Their type of storytelling, he says, doesn\u2019t depend so strongly on heroes, making it \u201cperhaps a better fit for these cynical times.\u201d Less gunplay, more emotional violence. I\u2019d add to his list Becky Masterson, Meghan Tifft, and Cecilia Ekb\u00e4ck.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s where his argument gets tricky. By conflating crime fiction, mystery, and thriller genres, he makes his argument a bit difficult to follow, because they have different foundational premises and conventions, and their readers have greatly different expectations. There isn\u2019t a lot of overlap between the audiences for John Sanford and Agatha Christie.<\/p>\n

Yet he says today\u2019s women writers have \u201ccome a long way from the golden age, from Christie and Sayers, from the least-likely-suspect sort of mystery<\/em> in which, proverbially, the butler did it\u201d (emphasis added). In today\u2019s psychological thrillers<\/em>, authors \u201cknow better. The girl did it, and she had her reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reviewing my own reading of some 60 books in the broad crime\/mystery\/thriller category over the past 18 months, I find that whether a book is interesting, well-written, genre-stretching, and good entertainment does not depend on the author\u2019s gender. Women and men were equally likely to write a book I liked. Great books are simply great books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the current issue of The Atlantic, author Terrence Rafferty has an intriguing piece titled \u201cWomen Are Writing the Best Crime Novels\u201d (in the \u201cCulture\u201d column, no less). Hmm. For real cultural insights, skim the article and read the comments. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Who Writes the Best Crime Novels: Men or Women? - A crazy question right there!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,174,3,32],"tags":[31,28,414],"class_list":["post-5802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-first-draft-blog","category-mystery","category-thriller","tag-author","tag-writers","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1vA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5802"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5804,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5802\/revisions\/5804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}