Are Crime Fiction Genres Going Hybrid?
The crime fiction genre encompasses a handful of sub-genres: whodunnits, noir, legal, historical, cozy, police procedural, amateur sleuth. We all know what these are. But what is a genre? You can read easy answers on the web, but theorists still don’t agree. Is it a set of rules for writers? Is it a game, like tennis, leaving each author to be a player who tries to follow the rules, sometimes fails, sometimes cheats? Or should we conceptualize it as a living entity, with species like chivalric romance or epic poetry that went extinct, while other species like science fiction and westerns interbreed to produce a successful hybrid offspring called Star Wars?
Twentieth century literary critic Northrop Frye saw genres as archetypes, recurring patterns that come to us from myths in the distant past. Shawn Coyne, author of Story Grid, says there are twelve fundamental genres. His idea is that genres respond to basic human needs. He correlates a ladder of the twelve genres to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs.’ In this model, crime fiction challenges and satisfies the need for safety
Yet genre fiction in the US publishing world started around the end of the 19th century, picked up pace through the era of the pulp magazines till the 1940s and then gained a huge readership with mass market paperbacks in the post-war era. Genre fiction continued as the low-class cousin of literary fiction up to the turn of the millennium. Now genre fiction is winning. This history contradicts views like Frye’s or Coyne’s that genres are unchanging mental categories of stories.
No matter that we can’t define genre or say what it is. There’s a vast industry of people out there telling us we better conform to it or die. From the cover design of a book down to the font of lettering, from the plot beats to the tropes, every element must evoke a particular genre tradition. Within this constraining structure authors still must add a bit of improvisation or readers will become bored with the replication of a form they know well. So readers demand genre repetition that is endlessly tweaked. Sound compulsive? This is the powerful, some might say tyrannical, role of genre in contemporary fiction.
Perhaps to escape the rigidity of genre rules, novels are hybridizing. Take cozies as an example. An heir of traditional murder mysteries, cozies have branched into sub-genres like culinary cozies, historical, paranormal, hobby-themed (like quilting or crosswords), occupational (for example, journalist, herbalist or antique store owner sleuths), holiday-themed (Christmas, Valentine’s), vacation or exotic locales and animal characters. Dizzying though this profusion may be, it further branches into sub-sub-categories. Historical subdivides into medieval, Victorian, Roaring 20s, Jacobite Scotland or any number of other eras in places all over the globe.
But don’t stop there. Cozies are hybridizing with other genres to produce, for example, rom cozies, a marriage of a cozy mystery with romance or romantic comedy. An emerging blend known as cozy fantasy blends magical cozies with a type of speculative fiction. Speculative mysteries situate a traditional murder mystery in a fictional panorama that departs from realism. The options for mix-and-match genres are endless. You can have a cyberpunk heist, a dystopian thriller, a neo-noir time travel, a magical locked room mystery, a gangster fantasy.
Despite the conventional dictum to conform to genre rules, there’s a big appetite out there for genre mash-ups that break some rules as they cram rule-bound plot structures together. You can find a tranche of articles on the web quoting industry insiders observing that cross-genre books are the hottest new thing. The good news is we don’t even have to know for sure what genre is to start mixing.