library shelves
Mar. 14th, 2013 12:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabI regularly grab large armfuls of stuff off the new books shelf in the library, on spec, to see if there are random authors out there I haven't run across who might be any good. This is particularly the case with murder mysteries - I read 'em faster than the authors write 'em, so I am constantly on the lookout for new series, or new to me, anyway.
One of the things that I've noticed is that there are more and more gimmicks in the mystery genre.
Used to be, you had only three basic models: police procedural, private
detective, and cozy, with the cozy protagonists being housewives of one
sort or another. Then we started having cozy protagonists who had a
particular kind of career - owning a shop, or a B&B, or a catering
business - and those were gimmicks, but at first there were only a few
people doing them, and they did them reasonably well, or their series
disappeared without a trace.And there were a few cozies that featured
pets, usually cats, another gimmick. I didn't always like the writing
style of the cozies, but I could stand the gimmicks, mostly. Though
telepathic cats who actually did the mystery solving were never a
favorite of mine, there were a few of them that were amusing in small
doses. Mostly those authors kept writing long past the point where I
thought it was amusing, though, getting more and more ridiculous with
each successive volume. And then lots of people jumped on the bandwagon,
including people who didn't really care about the mystery genre at all;
they just saw "hey, people buy books about a yarn shop owner who solves
mysteries so I'll write a series about a coffee shop owner who solves
mysteries" - or a pet grooming business owner who solves mysteries, or
a, let's see, what kind of store hasn't been done yet, I know! - a fine
china shop owner who solves mysteries! And I'll read a Wikipedia article
about fine china and throw around a few terms and a lot of brand names,
and it won't really matter if the mystery is any good or the characters
are likeable or whatnot, because people will buy it because it has
these buzzwords about fine china!
Or the gimmick is location - famous detective series were set in famous big cities, so hey, let's find a city no one has set something in yet, and throw in a few street names and restaurant names and people will read it because it's set in this exotic locale they're not familiar with!
And they pick up on the telepathic cats thing, and try and invent sillier and sillier
telepathic pets. Or, they go with newer gimmicks - hey, reality shows
are real popular! So I'll set my mystery series in a TV reality show!
And that way I can make all the dialog as phony as those shows and never
learn to write the way real people talk at all!!
And so the gimmicks pile up, and eventually you get books where more pages are
recipes than are about the mystery, or there are entire pages where our
protagonist is getting dressed and it's just lists of brand name
clothing and designer shoes. And then it's not a murder mystery any
more, it's a sales pitch that happens to have a murder gimmick in it,
and I am NOT INTERESTED.
One example of too many gimmicks, that I skimmed through and could hardly stand even the skim version: our protagonist spends lots of time drinking brand name liquor and talking about kinky sex with her neighbors, but still has time to have a really successful career! And she has a boyfriend who's a cop, and he doesn't mind at all that she constantly gets involved in murders and solves them for him! And she's going to be on a reality show! Which is supposed to be a bunch of women from whom the rich guy will choose a spouse, but really he's gay and it's one of the men in the house that he's going to choose! Only one of the guys is secretly straight and pretending to be gay in order to get the rich guy's money! Oh, and there's a guy who's secretly his son he didn't know he had! I'm pretty sure there were designer shoes in there somewhere too, but I couldn't hack even skimming more than the first two chapters and the last one.
And then there's the other bane of the random book grab, the self-published book. These show up on the library shelves, often because a local author has donated copies to the library. Where do I even start about the horrors of most self-published books? I won't even mention the lack of proofreading in many; that's just pitiful - but the stuff beyond typos and obvious grammar errors? The dialogue that clearly no one has ever tried saying out loud? The massive info dumps as filler? The continuity errors, oh gods, the continuity errors. Bad enough when it's just that the spelling of someone's name changes from Marjorie to Marjory, a little worse when someone's physical characteristics such as hair color change suddenly, or their background information changes. Then it gets to the point where someplace that we were told 2 chapters ago is a place our protagonist has never been, but suddenly he's familiar with it and has spent years there. Or there's dialogue and suddenly one of the characters who's speaking is someone who wasn't in the book at all until suddenly they were in the middle of this conversation! And then there's the really egregious stuff - the narration changes from third-person to first person at random times that are clearly accidental, not a deliberate viewpoint change to make something clearer. Or similarly, the tense changes for no reason, and a paragraph that was in standard fictional past tense is suddenly being told in the present tense, even though nothing else has changed. Or someone who was speaking standard English (albeit stiffly and without contractions or very unrealistically) suddenly starts speaking in a dialect, with the dialect spelled phonetically.
I've been sent a few such books by authors who see my name on Amazon; so far, there hasn't been a one of the self-published books where I'd be able to write a positive review.
Sometimes it really makes me question whether it's worth trying to read anything new. But in the next post I will describe a couple of books I liked, one with a gimmick that was a little bit gimmicky but the characters were likeable and the plot was good, so it worked; another that was self-published but turned out to be quite decent.
One of the things that I've noticed is that there are more and more gimmicks in the mystery genre.
Used to be, you had only three basic models: police procedural, private
detective, and cozy, with the cozy protagonists being housewives of one
sort or another. Then we started having cozy protagonists who had a
particular kind of career - owning a shop, or a B&B, or a catering
business - and those were gimmicks, but at first there were only a few
people doing them, and they did them reasonably well, or their series
disappeared without a trace.And there were a few cozies that featured
pets, usually cats, another gimmick. I didn't always like the writing
style of the cozies, but I could stand the gimmicks, mostly. Though
telepathic cats who actually did the mystery solving were never a
favorite of mine, there were a few of them that were amusing in small
doses. Mostly those authors kept writing long past the point where I
thought it was amusing, though, getting more and more ridiculous with
each successive volume. And then lots of people jumped on the bandwagon,
including people who didn't really care about the mystery genre at all;
they just saw "hey, people buy books about a yarn shop owner who solves
mysteries so I'll write a series about a coffee shop owner who solves
mysteries" - or a pet grooming business owner who solves mysteries, or
a, let's see, what kind of store hasn't been done yet, I know! - a fine
china shop owner who solves mysteries! And I'll read a Wikipedia article
about fine china and throw around a few terms and a lot of brand names,
and it won't really matter if the mystery is any good or the characters
are likeable or whatnot, because people will buy it because it has
these buzzwords about fine china!
Or the gimmick is location - famous detective series were set in famous big cities, so hey, let's find a city no one has set something in yet, and throw in a few street names and restaurant names and people will read it because it's set in this exotic locale they're not familiar with!
And they pick up on the telepathic cats thing, and try and invent sillier and sillier
telepathic pets. Or, they go with newer gimmicks - hey, reality shows
are real popular! So I'll set my mystery series in a TV reality show!
And that way I can make all the dialog as phony as those shows and never
learn to write the way real people talk at all!!
And so the gimmicks pile up, and eventually you get books where more pages are
recipes than are about the mystery, or there are entire pages where our
protagonist is getting dressed and it's just lists of brand name
clothing and designer shoes. And then it's not a murder mystery any
more, it's a sales pitch that happens to have a murder gimmick in it,
and I am NOT INTERESTED.
One example of too many gimmicks, that I skimmed through and could hardly stand even the skim version: our protagonist spends lots of time drinking brand name liquor and talking about kinky sex with her neighbors, but still has time to have a really successful career! And she has a boyfriend who's a cop, and he doesn't mind at all that she constantly gets involved in murders and solves them for him! And she's going to be on a reality show! Which is supposed to be a bunch of women from whom the rich guy will choose a spouse, but really he's gay and it's one of the men in the house that he's going to choose! Only one of the guys is secretly straight and pretending to be gay in order to get the rich guy's money! Oh, and there's a guy who's secretly his son he didn't know he had! I'm pretty sure there were designer shoes in there somewhere too, but I couldn't hack even skimming more than the first two chapters and the last one.
And then there's the other bane of the random book grab, the self-published book. These show up on the library shelves, often because a local author has donated copies to the library. Where do I even start about the horrors of most self-published books? I won't even mention the lack of proofreading in many; that's just pitiful - but the stuff beyond typos and obvious grammar errors? The dialogue that clearly no one has ever tried saying out loud? The massive info dumps as filler? The continuity errors, oh gods, the continuity errors. Bad enough when it's just that the spelling of someone's name changes from Marjorie to Marjory, a little worse when someone's physical characteristics such as hair color change suddenly, or their background information changes. Then it gets to the point where someplace that we were told 2 chapters ago is a place our protagonist has never been, but suddenly he's familiar with it and has spent years there. Or there's dialogue and suddenly one of the characters who's speaking is someone who wasn't in the book at all until suddenly they were in the middle of this conversation! And then there's the really egregious stuff - the narration changes from third-person to first person at random times that are clearly accidental, not a deliberate viewpoint change to make something clearer. Or similarly, the tense changes for no reason, and a paragraph that was in standard fictional past tense is suddenly being told in the present tense, even though nothing else has changed. Or someone who was speaking standard English (albeit stiffly and without contractions or very unrealistically) suddenly starts speaking in a dialect, with the dialect spelled phonetically.
I've been sent a few such books by authors who see my name on Amazon; so far, there hasn't been a one of the self-published books where I'd be able to write a positive review.
Sometimes it really makes me question whether it's worth trying to read anything new. But in the next post I will describe a couple of books I liked, one with a gimmick that was a little bit gimmicky but the characters were likeable and the plot was good, so it worked; another that was self-published but turned out to be quite decent.
