LITERATURE: Genre

One of the things I like about the 2005 BAMS is this decision by series editor, Otto Penzler:

Few of the stories are detective fiction, a tale in which an official police officer, a private eye, or an amateur sleuth is confronted with a crime and pursues the culprit by making observations and deductions.  It has been my practice to define a mystery as any work of fiction in which a crime or the threat of a crime is central to the theme or plot.  There is greater emphasis in these pages on why a crime was committed, or if it will be done at all, than on trying to discover the perpetrator, which has upset some readers.  That simply can’t be helped.  (Best American Mystery Stories 2005, p. xi)

But it does present a dilemma for those readers who are used to the decades of mystery focusing on the crime and whodunit.  The mystery, for them, is unraveling the narrative structure to pick out the clues and try to reach a conclusion before it is revealed, or better yet, be totally blown away by the solving. 

It’s tough to break tradition.  I saw this with some constructive criticism on one of my own stories, that starts pretty much with the death of the protagonist.  Many suggested that I not reveal this until the end.  But that wasn’t the point of the story so it didn’t follow the basic linear structure.  To me, it wasn’t important what happened to him, but rather, what kind of person he was and how he ended up dead.   (It wasn’t a mystery story, btw.) 

But breaking the "rules" of story telling does question the genre itself.  Is it still a mystery if we know the answer?  To me, yes; the mystery is in the why rather than the who and what.  What this move accomplishes as well is to raise the level of mystery to literary fiction, and seeks the same elements of quality writing to develop character and story.  Now in mystery writing, story has always been one of the most essential elements, and plot was necessarily the driving force behind an also necessarily quicker pacing.  We never really cared about the perp; he was gruff, evil, whatever, and we didn’t have any connection.  Penzler’s optimism in expanding the boundaries for the mystery genre can only improve on the the quality of the story as a whole.

Maybe the new direction of fiction writing will, in fact, blend complementary genres so that they stray in wonderful new areas of story.  One more barrier down.