I recently undertook an expedition through the mystery stacks at my local Barnes & Noble. This might not sound like an extraordinary endeavor, but, to tell the truth, most of my mystery purchases have been directed by recommendations on material similar to Braun's - though my eyes had wandered from time to time, I had never really taken a good, long browse through the entire section before. And, in doing so, I came to a somewhat startling realization - we aren't situated in a such a reputable literary neighborhood, are we? So contentedly ensconced was I in our posh penthouse apartment that I never ventured beyond our magnificent copper doors to notice the building falling down around us.
The genre cover art is hideous. I've complained about it before, in the "I Am Grateful that the Cat Who...s Never..." column, but it takes a good, long survey of the mystery shelves to appreciate how often, and in how many (albeit formulaic) ways, the hideousness manifests itself. Cooking mysteries are by far the worst offenders, due to the availability to illustrators of gingerbread men, figural pepper shakers and cookie jars, and bride-&-groom wedding-cake toppers to be whimsically dismembered or shot or to stare agape at the perpetration or aftermath of unspeakable homicides - not to mention the possible use of strawberry filling to stand in for blood, cookie cutters to suggest chalk body outlines, and all manner of pastries and moldable dishes to serve as avatars for mystery's favorite cover-art vice, the ubiquitous skull. All cover artists seem to be required to work a ghoulish, grinning skull, the visual element of choice in branding an off-the-shelf paperback as of the genre, into every single composition - formed by the leaves and fruit on a tree, the windows and ivy on the side of a house, the hot fudge dripping down a sundae, the meat of a half-peeled apple, the lace pattern of a doily, the spines of books on a shelf, the tea-stain on a tablecloth, the criss-cross of ankle ribbons on a pair of ballet shoes, the tarnish on a silver teapot, the craters on a rising moon. While there exist many other publisher-sanctioned ways to ruin a perfectly good work of art - threatening messages scrawled across the piece in a drippingly sanguinary Mad Slasher font, fawning depictions of various bladed implements of mayhem which lovingly linger over their Ginsu-esque sharpness, or variations on any of the darker tendencies the cooking-mystery artists are free to indulge at will - the skulls have become so de rigeur that they're shoehorned even onto the covers of titles which unquestionably need no help with genre-identification (like the Murder, She Wrote spin-off novels) and remain the number-one cause of mystery lovers being embarrassed into reading with their covers turned back.
I will say that although ghastliness figures in greatly, outright blood and gore are uncommon - except with some titles from certain small presses new to the genre ropes, which feature crude portrayals of impalements and lacerations which resemble student-drawn high-school shop-class posters gleefully illustrating the consequences if proper precautions are not taken with the circular saw, whose sheer unsettlingness almost compensates for their big brothers' relative restraint. Otherwise, though, rare are the clever, classy collections of plot-pertinent objects or the bright palettes and smart use of color with which Jill Bauman and Walter Harper have spoiled us - instead, while cover art as a whole has become overall more sophisticated in recent years, mystery's cover art largely remains as subtle and graceful as that of the Tales from the Crypt-ish horror-comic anthologies of the '50's.
Titling is another pitfall, with many books boasting schlocky titles which echo their death-obsessed cover art - Dolly Is Dead, A Hearse of a Different Color, Chopping Spree, The Main Corpse, Suture Self, Abracadaver. (Cheesily morbid puns are to the potboiler mystery genre what adjectives like "purrfect" are to reviews of the Cat Who...s.) Some don't even try; one series plainly names its installments Strawberry Shortcake Murder, Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, Blueberry Muffin Murder, et al., and, while I do not mean to continually pick on Carolyn Hart, she has as of late adopted for her Death on Demand series what is perhaps the laziest and most incoherent titling scheme conceived - plugging a keyword for the book at hand into the title and tagging "dead" onto the end (White Elephant Dead, Sugarplum Dead, April Fool Dead). Hart's misuse of the word "dead" and its associates, however, is, I suppose, no worse than anyone else's - a casual sweep of Amazon and bn.com turns up Book Early for Murder, Appointment for Murder, Mind over Murder, You've Got Murder, This Old Murder, Sex and Murder.com, The Murder Channel, We Wish You a Merry Murder, Deck the Halls with Murder, A Bicycle Built for Murder, Zen and the Art of Murder, Murder Runs in the Family, Murder Gets a Life, Innkeeping with Murder, Murder Carries a Torch, Murder on a Bad Hair Day, Murder on a Girls' Night Out, Murder Boogies with Elvis. (Murder leads a more active life than I do.) One wonders if the release of Dead Murder Death Death Dead can be far behind.
Murder mystery, in addition to running in the family, carrying a torch, etc., is also a very *gimmicky* genre, offering books with crosswords included, with recipes & cross-stitch patterns, with famous figures (Jane Austen, Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth I, Steve Allen, the aforementioned King himself) as the sleuths. (The Steve Allen mysteries were written by Allen himself, so it'd be interesting to see how the crimes & murders are handled, considering Allen's crusades against violence in the media.) Sleuths from and books set in cultures considered somewhat mystic in the U.S. are popular - Japan, the U.S. West of the American Indian, Africa, to an extent. (The cover blurbs of the American Indian-themed mysteries I've seen play up the Great Spirit/Words of Native Wisdom angle, which makes me wonder how closely the reservations of these books resemble the real world of youth gang problems, rampant alcohol abuse, uphill crusades to get congressional funding for well-digging, piping, and purification systems so that everyone can drink actual potable water, debates about how much non-Indian blood a person can have and still be a member of the tribe, substandard housing, strife in the tribal government, and Subway sandwich shops riddled with bullet holes.) England and the rest of the British Isles of all ages - particularly the medieval and late Victorian eras, and the modern-day countryside used as the living shorthand for all which "cozy" stands for - sell obscenely, as do any series with a culinary slant - as do any featuring cats, the products of a myriad experiments to distill the success of groundbreaking books into a mass-market formula. (Our own subgenre is so expansive and profitable, in fact, that several series have taken to writing a token family cat into one or two scenes so the animal can be plastered on the cover and the author can cash in on the subgenre by the flimsiest of associations and misleading advertising.) And this does not take into account all the up-and-coming genre-lets concerning subjects like bird-watching or politics (including a couple series penned by Presidential daughters Margaret Truman and Susan Ford, which involves another familiar gimmick, the celebrity author), or, of all things, home-repair. Rarely is released a mystery title that can not be neatly pigeonholed into some niche market.
And, as with any successful media enterprise, there are the spin-offs - most popularly here, the cookbooks, released even for series that have bugger-all to do with memorable food in the first place. (Even the rec.arts.mystery newsgroup has put one out, for Chrissakes.) A few series guides like The Cat Who... Companion pop up here and there, but the format, borrowed from the fantasy and sci-fi genres, is rather too narrow in scope for a market which prefers its merchandise do double-duty audience-wise; the big business is in themed short-story anthologies hosted by a well-known character of the subgenre, which both cash in on a successful franchise and serve as launching pads and promotion for other authors and prospective series in the same genre. In light of this, I'm surprised the Cat Who...'s spawn took as long to generate as they did.
My trip to the bookstore brought me one more surprise - the conclusion, from the evidence on the cover blurbs, that the normally tough-to-please New York Times Book Review will give thumbs-up to practically any mystery paperback. (The Cat Who...s seem to be the exception - see the Reviews section of the Links page - perhaps because the series sells enough and climbs high enough on the Times's bestseller list to be considered "mainstream" and thus receive a modicum of actual critical attention, but smaller mystery titles get a complete bye.) I have no explanation for this phenomenon but to speculate that the Times, like many other media outlets, views the genre as pulp that does not adhere to any sort of critical standards whatsoever and permits its staffers to abandon said standards all together in their evaluations. Innumerable are the instances where I've read - from a whole spectrum of different publications - a reviewer lament how sub-standard a certain mystery novel is, but demur how it will probably suffice for the author's audience.
What I can conclude from this clutter of observations and opinions, I think, is this - the publishing world at large thinks that we mystery readers are idiots. Every aspect of a mystery novel's presentation is tailored toward netting the totally tasteless consumer. Even if most of the books on the market are not completely worthless and indeed have merit (even if there are, so to speak, still good folks inhabiting the condemnable structure), they are nevertheless marketed as the former, the content trivialized and ridiculed with morbid cutesiness via the titling and the cover art, spiced up with gimmicks, treated as inherently amusing and incapable of standing on its own or being handled with anything but jokiness and derision, as if no other aspect of the book except a homicide deserves attention, as if the concept of such a novel being serious or worthy on any level cannot be fathomed. Substance is completely beside the point; the presentation is all, and the presentation is awful.
not because of the presentation, but despite it. You may wonder what my purpose is in spelling this all out. I don't have an immediate, crystallized point to make (besides the "idiots" musing above), but it is important, I think, to make ourselves aware of the factors which affect us as a result, despite Braun's breakout success, of still inhabiting the larger mystery neighborhood - how the books are sold, what the expectations are of the the material, how we as consumers are treated. (Any situation in which a quiet, conservative, intellectual-skewing audience is courted with images from teen slasher-flick movie posters must be afflicted with a bad case of communications breakdown somewhere along the line, unless the marketing strategy involved is far, far more abstract a science than I can fathom.) I'm not in a position to deeply scrutinize the information or yet apply it in any significant manner to a particular problem, but I am going to file it away for possible future reference. And I will remember: mystery is regarded as a genre of hacks. Mystery is regarded as a genre of hacks. Take from that as you will.
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