WHAT’S YOUR GENRE

by Steve Steinbock

My re-reading of Julian Symons’s Bloody Murder has gotten me thinking about all sorts of things. It’s a brilliant book. It’s short, and although it’s densely written, it’s easy to read. And it’s packed with things to think about.

A word about Symons for those of you who haven’t met him. Symons (pronounced “Simmons”) was born in 1912 in London, and died in 1994, having lived most of his life in London. From 1958 to 1968 he reviewed mysteries for the Sunday Times (London). In addition to Bloody Murder (second only to Haycraft’s Murder For Pleasure), he wrote twenty-something novels and a slew of short stories (most of which appeared in EQMM). The MWA named Symons a Grand Master in 1982, and he succeeded Agatha Christie as president of the Detection Club, serving from 1976 to 1985.

A couple weeks back I mentioned that Symons’s The 31st of February was on my To-Be-Read list. I’m now halfway through. It’s well written, but much bleaker than I’d expected. It’s about an advertising man whose wife had recently fatally fallen down the cellar stairs. At work, someone has repeatedly reset his desk calendar to the day she died. Then a love letter written in his wife’s hand but clearly written to someone other than him has appeared on his desk. Other bits of unpleasantry. Penzler and Steinbrunner (in The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection) refer to The 31st of February as Symons’s first “crime novel” (as opposed to “novel of detection.”

Getting back to Bloody Murder, I came to Symons’s analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson. Symons explains that Stevenson. . .

made no serious attempt to write a detective story. Stevenson preferred an episodic tale to one with a tightly constructed plot, and he had no taste for the details of policework, but the creation of a mysterious atmosphere came naturally to him, and he was interested in the borderland where adventure turned onto crime.

I was struck by a thought. I had to put the book down for several moments to parse it out. What I realized is so patently obvious that most of you will probably be thinking, “well, duh, Steinbock.” Symons – like Penzler and Steinbrunner, and like most of us – distinguished genres where they ought to have been distinguishing traits. To use a biological metaphor, they (and we) referred to genes as if they were separate species.

There are no pure genres or subgenres. Every book contains a collection of traits. A “mystery” will probably contain crime, detection, and suspense. It may have elements of humor, angst, or politics. It might emphasize village life, urban decay, character development, or puzzle elements. But in the end, pigeon-holing books is as silly as the way we pigeon-hole races.

When, as a kid, I read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, two points stuck with me. The first was that the plot used fingerprint analysis – probably for the first time in fiction writing – to establish identity. The second was the very absurdity of race. It staggers me that there are still people who want to label Mark Twain’s writing as racist, which he had the wisdom in 1893 to describe a character thus:

From Roxy’s manner of speech, a stranger would have expected her to be black, but she was not. Only one sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did not show. . . To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and salable as such. Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a Negro.

I may have a wide nose, a long nose, a flat nose, or a hawk-nose; my skin may be olive, pink, brown, or even yellow; I might have this blood-type, that blood-type, or a predisposition to a hundred different medical conditions. But ultimately, each person is a racial and ethnic package of traits. The standard “genres” of race that I was taught of in school (Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Aboriginal) are as impractical as they are ugly-sounding. The racial “subgenres” of Mediterranean, Pacific Islander, Bangladeshi, Sub-Saharan, or Nordic are just as silly.

In my long-winded and roundabout way, I bring us back to the topic of literary genre. It’s convenient to categorize writers, books, and styles as “suspense,” “cozy,” “hard-boiled,” etc. But isn’t it also a convenient way to discriminate?