Cozy New Weird Noir, it’s the next big thing
Steve Mosby is discussing an article by Richard Morgan about in-fighting in the sf/f community. Richard, whose novels straddle both sf and crime, raises the question of why there seems to be much less of this in the crime fiction community; Steve agrees, and has added his own thoughts on why this might be. It’s an interesting question, and the premise rings true to me. But why is this?
It’s not that sf/f writers are more prone to petty jealousies and stabs at the back of passing authors. When I started writing short stories, most of them were some flavour of sf/f/h, and the support and encouragement of people within the genre blew me away, and I will be forever grateful for that. I’ve not found the crime community to be any different. So it’s not the people, what is it?
SF in particular has a grand tradition of manifestos and movements that crime doesn’t. There are distinctions between subgenres in crime, with edges of various degrees of blurriness, but there are far fewer with a meaningful identity. There’s the split between that which is cosy, and that which is not, and in the latter camp there’s the ongoing discussion about what makes something noir as opposed to hardboiled, but it rarely spills over into angry exchanges and bitter recriminations. There’s not the same degree of inward-looking analysis either, of the place of the genre in literature as a whole or the interplay between what is sf/f and what is literary fiction. In part, maybe this is because crime lives a little bit closer to the edges of the genre ghetto. It’s still in there, for sure, but I don’t think feels quite as looked-down upon by the literary establishment, quite as marginalised. Perhaps this means that crime hasn’t felt so much need to justify, explain and categorize itself.
There’s not the history in crime fiction of Movements along the lines of the New Wave, the New Weird, or whatever. And where you get a movement, it has to be defined, and where it’s defined, it’s usually done by setting it up in opposition to other things…and where you do that, almost inevitably those other things are being put down. There have been flashes of it, from time to time in crime fiction. I remember when Murdaland announced itself by having a go at the established giants of AHMM and EQMM, and there was a lot of discussion about whether having to conform to the requirements of those magazines meant that stories were hobbled, rather than simply different. But that’s about as heated as I have seen it get.
Although the crime market is much bigger in terms of sales, and there is a thriving online and offline community in the crime-fiction world, I don’t think that community is anywhere on the scale of sf/f.The relative numbers of short-fiction markets is maybe one indicator of that, as is the number of conventions. It’s easier to be a crime author and not to be involved with the community, and many happily go on unaware of it, or unbothered by it. I’d guess this is less the case with f/sf. Maybe this makes a difference too.
What would a movement look like in crime-fiction terms anyway? What would be the Dogme of noir, the New Puritans of hardboiled, the New Weird of police procedurals? Discussion of the nature of the beast is a good thing, and there’s been some interesting debate about it. But there’s a difference between a discussion over what makes something noir or not, crime or not, realist or not, and the dogmatic line-drawing of a manifesto. Besides, manifestos generally come across as rather pompous things, and I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the major motivations behind most of them is look at me, look at me, so maybe we’re not missing much.
(Still, if anyone is going to write a manifesto, can we have:
1) If your protagonist is a cop or PI, you cannot make him or her an alcoholic or recovering alcoholic.
and
2) If your protagonist has a friend, they cannot be a psychopath with a heart of gold who will do all the nasty violent things your protagonist won’t because that would make him look bad. Seriously, they can’t. There’s already Joe Pike and Mouse and Win, and that’s three too many. Make your protagonist get his hands dirty.
in there somewhere? Please?)
Tags: crime, fantasy, genres, manifestos, science-fiction, sf, sf/f