Genre Spotlight 2006 "Mystery": Dark is the New Cozy

Americans are often accused of being a provincial bunch, but consider the xenophobic firestorm that broke out in Britain last fall when the Crime Writers Association (CWA) announced its 2005 nominations for the prestigious Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel. Four of the six finalists were European crime novels in translation, and the winner was Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason's Silence of the Grave (to be published this fall in the United States by St. Martin's Minotaur).

In the wake of criticism for not including more British writers (Barbara Nadel was the sole UK nominee), the CWA recruited a new sponsor, replaced the Gold Dagger with a richer prize, and restricted nominees to books written in English. As a consolation prize, the CWA this year created the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger, with award money going to both author and translator.

What did they put in the aquavit?

“This incident proves how powerful an influx and influence of crime writing from other countries has become,” says Poisoned Pen bookstore owner and publisher Barbara Peters. Especially noteworthy is the U.S. invasion of Scandinavian crime fiction, which Peters attributes to the influence of Swedish author Henning Mankell. This spring alone has seen the arrival of three mysteries from Sweden: Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm, Håkan Nesser's Borkmann's Point, and Helene Tursten's The Torso.

In July, Norwegian Karin Fossum will tour the United States for the first time to promote her third Inspector Sejer mystery, When the Devil Holds the Candle (Harcourt). Citing interest from across the country, Harcourt publicity director Jennifer Gilmore says, “We are growing her amazingly well. She writes so well about place, and her stories are so compelling.” July also marks the U.S. debut of fellow countrywoman Anne Holt, whose What Is Mine (Warner) is the first of a three-book series featuring an ex-FBI profiler and a Norwegian police commissioner.

Who's hot, who's not

Other countries coming on strong as sources of exciting new crime writing or as mystery settings include Russia (Boris Akunin's The Death of Achilles, LJ 3/1/06), South Africa (Deon Meyer's Dead Before Dying, Little, Brown, May), and Turkey. Italy also remains hot. In addition to such popular English-language authors as Donna Leon, Magdalen Nabb, and Michael Dibdin, a new crop of Italian crime writers is attracting U.S. publishers. Next February, Harcourt plans to release Giulio Leoni's The Mosaic Crime, an antiquarian thriller with a detective protagonist who happens to be the poet Dante Alighieri.

Even France, which hasn't seen that much success with American mystery readers, is breaking in. Cara Black's latest entry in her Aimée Leduc series, Murder in Montmartre, recently opened at No. 10 on the Los Angeles Times best sellers list. “This is her moment,” says Soho Press publisher and editor Laura Hruska, adding that Borders and Waldenbooks are promoting Black's books because of the Parisian setting despite their customers' usual disinterest in foreign mysteries. Soho will publish Black's seventh mystery, Murder in the Ile Saint-Louis, next March.

The release of the movie The Da Vinci Code may further stimulate interest in Gallic-flavored religious thrillers. Coming in August from new publisher Pegasus Books is Frederic Lenoir and Violette Cabesos's The Angel's Promise. Set in the famed medieval abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel, the suspense novel was a best seller in France and Spain, and publisher Claiborne Hancock hopes to ride that wave of success over here. “There is so much good stuff out there that it is nice to widen the door and publish foreign writers,” he says.

An inside look

Poisoned Pen's Peters credits this new openness to foreign writers and settings to publishers' drive for visibility in an overcrowded marketplace. But other editors argue that U.S. readers increasingly want the insider's viewpoint on other countries. “People travel. Reading foreign mysteries offers an easy way to investigate another culture,” says Soho's Hruska.

One Soho Crime title already stirring interest even though it won't be released until February 2007 is Time magazine Jerusalem bureau chief Matt Beynon Rees's The Collaborator of Bethlehem, the first in a new series featuring a Palestinian detective. “You get a very good mystery,” explains Hruska, “but you also get insight into a troubled country.”

Lost in translation

Finding translators can be a stumbling block for American publishers. Acknowledging her lack of foreign-language skills, Hruska recalls receiving a proposal about an Icelandic detective. “I was stumped. I don't know anyone who reads Icelandic.”

On the other hand, Kodansha America, the U.S. branch of the Japanese publisher, prides itself on the quality of its translations. “We choose our translators very carefully,” says marketing and sales director Laura Shatzkin. In February 2007, Kodansha will launch Asa Nonami's The Hunter, whose protagonist is a former motorbike patrolwoman–turned–detective. Like other successful Kodansha titles (Natsuo Kirino's Out, the first Japanese novel to be nominated for an Edgar Award, and Miyuki Miyabi's Shadow Family), this is a dark, violent crime novel penned by a popular female author.

Why are Japanese women writing noir fiction, the preserve of mainly male writers? “There is a revolution going on in Japan, and these books represent that,” says Shatzkin. “These authors write about angry female characters who act in ways that go against the Madame Butterfly stereotype of the submissive Japanese woman.”

Noir is still the color

Judging by the success of two-year-old retro-pulp publisher Hard Case Crime, which scored a coup in 2005 with Stephen King's The Colorado Kid (LJ 9/15/05), the resurgence of hard-boiled crime fiction continues. Recalling how difficult it was to sell a noir novel 20 years ago in a market dominated by cat mysteries, publisher Charles Ardai wryly notes that these trends run in cycles. “At some point, people will get sick of angst, and they will want more cats. ”

Among the noir titles Hard Case has scheduled are Bust (May), the first collaboration (“very, very dark,” says Ardai) between award-winning crime writers Ken Bruen and Jason Starr; Max Allan Collins's The Last Quarry (Aug.), featuring a hit man Collins first created in the Seventies; and David Dodge's The Last Match (Oct.), a newly discovered unpublished novel from the late author of It Takes a Thief.

Publishers like Bleak House are revitalizing noir, too, with books like Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues (May) by Randall Peffer. The protagonist is a half-Vietnamese, half–African American drag queen accused of murdering her lover. Says publisher Benjamin LeRoy, “It's dark. I mean dark. It's unlike anything I've read before, and the language is art.” This September, readers will go for a walk on the dark side of Phoenix, not usually considered noir territory, when Poisoned Pen publishes Jon Talton's Arizona Dreams.

The most original neo-noir voices, however, are British. A rising star is Newcastle-based Martyn Waites, whose gritty, hard-hitting thrillers have been praised by Ian Rankin. The Mercy Seat, his sixth novel and the first to be published in the United States, heads Pegasus Books' debut list this spring. Founding publisher Hancock, who previously edited mysteries for Carroll & Graf, lauds Waites's ability to evoke provocatively a city's dark underbelly and predicts the young writer will become a big deal in the crime fiction world.

What's old is new again

With hard-boiled fiction dominating the market, is there room for traditional, or what the British refer to as “intelligent cozies”? St. Martin's editor Ben Sevier identifies Jacqueline Winspear, Alexander McCall Smith, and his own discovery, Louise Penny, as leaders in what he sees as a renaissance in traditional mysteries. “We are coming out of a period in which a lot of first novels were published in this rich, almost literary, noir genre. Some of the most exciting new mysteries harken back to another time but with a modern twist.” St. Martin's Minotaur imprint is so enthusiastic about Canadian Penny's small-town intelligent cozy, Still Life, that it is heavily promoting the debut novel in its spring/summer “Unleash the Beast” program.

William Morrow/Avon senior editor Sarah Durand points out that new traditional mysteries like Katherine Hall Page's The Body in the Ivy (Morrow, Nov.)—a reimagining of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None—are delving more substantially into such issues as betrayal, friendship, and love.

Thanks to Michael Connelly's Edgar-nominated The Lincoln Lawyer, a subgenre that had gone stale in recent years is also experiencing a revival. “What is different about these legal thrillers,” remarks HarperCollins/Morrow senior vice president and executive editor Caroline Marino, who edits lawyers-turned-authors James Grippando and William Lasher, “is that there are fewer scenes in the courtroom and more outside action.”

The medium is the message

Once simmering quietly on publishers' back burners, paranormal mysteries featuring vampires, witches, werewolves, and psychics are now at full boil, with authors like Laurell K. Hamilton, MaryJanice Davidson, and Charlaine Harris selling especially well. Although Poisoned Pen's Peters believes this trend represents a desperate search by publishers for the new, she admits to having several titles featuring friendly ghosts on her list this season.

Citing the success of such TV shows as Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, Avon publisher Liate Stehlik interprets the industry's focus on the supernatural as a reflection of popular culture's current obsessions. High on Avon's summer list is Casey Daniels's Don of the Dead (Jun.), a mass-market series debut with a cemetery tour guide who investigates the unsolved murders of her graveyard's denizens. Daniels will promote the book this May at the Romantic Times annual convention, an interesting example of the increasing overlap of different genres.

Also appearing in publishers' crystal balls: Charlie Huston's second vampire mystery, No Dominion (Ballantine, Jan. 2007), which Random House senior editor Mark Tavini describes as “Bram Stoker meets Raymond Chandler”; Dianne Emley's The First Cut (Ballantine, Aug.), whose female detective has brief visions stemming from a near-death experience; and Anna Salter's Truth Catcher (Pegasus, Oct.), which stars a forensic psychologist who happens to be psychic.

Small presses pick up the slack

Pegasus's acquisition of Salter from Pocket Books, which had published her four Dr. Michael Stone novels, reflects the ongoing trend of small publishers picking up midlist mystery authors dropped by big houses. Although Salter had a good sales record, explains Pegasus's Hancock, her publisher was not interested in publishing her new book, a departure from her old series. “For me, she will be a lead author,” says Hancock. “And it's beneficial for a new house to acquire established writers who have a great readership.”

As large publishers increasingly allow their mystery titles to go out of print, new presses are stepping in to serve as the genre's memory, reprinting lost works of real merit. “It's a nice way to show our appreciation for great mystery writers of the past,” says Hancock, who plans to reissue the suspense novels of noir master Cornell Woolrich, beginning with his 1934 Manhattan Love Song.

Frustrated by the number of excellent mysteries no longer in print, Maggie Topkis, co-owner of a Greenwich Village mystery bookstore, initiated a new reprint line last June. Among Felony & Mayhem Press's (www.felonyandmayhem.com) first releases was Elizabeth Ironside's 1995 award-winning Death in the Garden, which briefly became an Amazon best seller following a Wall Street Journal profile. Says Topkis of her reprinting activities, “I feel like a monk in the Middle Ages.”

The mysteries of marketing

For publishers, marketing new crime fiction is always a tricky art. “I'm not a big believer in advertising,” explains St. Martin's publisher Sally Richardson. “We believe much more in letting the book community know that we are behind an author.” For the fall, St. Martin's plans a new promotion program, “Celebrate the Beast: The Beast Breaks Out,” in which red boxes containing four galleys of what the publisher considers to be breakout novels will be shipped to booksellers and librarians. Richardson praises these titles—Julia Spencer-Fleming's All Mortal Flesh, Brian Freeman's Stripped, Indridason's aforementioned Silence of the Grave, and Steve Hamilton's Stolen Season—as the strongest works done yet by these authors.

And do mystery author web sites, crime fiction blogs like Sarah Weinman's Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, and popular discussion lists like DorothyL play a role in getting the word out about new mysteries? Publisher opinions are mixed. Avon's Stehlik finds them useful for market research. “It's helpful for us to find out what people are talking about in mystery circles, and it gives us insight into reader demographics, which can be surprising.” She credits the best-selling success of J.A. Jance's mass-market original Edge of Evil to Jance's web site. And St. Martin's editor Sevier praises the smart and well-thought-out opinions of Baltimore Sun crime fiction columnist Weinman on her Confessions blog. “That's the kind of word of mouth we love to see.”

But Poisoned Pen president Robert Rosenwald has his doubts, arguing that for an unknown author in the process of developing a fan base, the web as a broadcast medium has limitations. “Booksellers and librarians still have to do the handselling,” he stresses.

The next big hook?

For the near future, most publishers will continue to look for a unique hook and voice to help their books break out of the pack. On the horizon: gambling mysteries. Ballantine is releasing James Swain's back-to-back casino crime capers, Deadman's Poker (Apr.) and Deadman's Bluff (May). And coming next February is The Picasso Flop (Mysterious) by Vince Van Patten, host of the World Poker Tour. But Mark Tavini of Random House foresees a renewed interest in developing new writers. “More agents are pushing the voice and the talent instead of the hook. There is a new emphasis on the writing and the characters and the possibility of a series.”