Tim Wohlforth wrote: "My sense is that he (a top agent)'s
right. I think it is easier for a new writer to break in with
a cozy ..." than a hardboiled and/or noir novel.
My opinion is that in the publishing industry (just as in the
movie industry and the television industry and the breakfast
food industry) presentation is just as important as product.
As William Goldman has pointed out about film executives,
nobody knows anything. It's all imagined trends and buzzwords
and faulty logic. Ignoring the success of Crais or Grafton or
Paretsky or Kellerman or Burke or Parker or at least a half
dozen others who regularly hit the bestseller lists, editors
think the private eye-first person narrator type of novel is
passé® (Try coming up with ten cozies who make the
lists.)
So ... If John Macdonald were to have just written "The
Moving Target" last week and an agent were to submit it as
"the best private eye novel I've ever read," there would be
few if any takers. However, if that same agent were to submit
it as "the edgiest crime novel I've read in years," the
result would probably be much more positive. My sense of it
is that "edgy" has been trumping "cozy" at publishing houses
for a while now. This could have started back with Lehane's
"A Drink Before the War," as much a genre private eye novel
as has ever been written, that was billed as "a novel of
suspense." The jacket uses words like "gritty" and
"disturbing" and, yes,
"edgy." You won't find either "hardboiled" or "noir" anywhere
in view.
Tim singled out St. Martin's as a house with a preference for
cozies. I haven't been clocking their mystery titles, but my
guess is they're also publishing a whole lot of "edgies."
Here are a bunch just off the top of a recent pile -- Ken
Bruen's "Blitz," Mike Silverling's "The Sterling
Inheritance," Lono Waiwaiole's "Wiley's Shuffle," Brendon
DuBois' "Buried Dreams." The other houses -- Doubleday,
Random, Knopf, et al -- clearly are not looking for the new
Lilian Jackson Braun or even the new Don Westlake, though
they probably should be. They're after the new Deaver or
Cornwell or Co ben.
The bottom line is: what kind of book do you really want to
write? If you're just as happy plotting out a cozy, then go
for it. But don't try a cozy because you think it will be an
easier sell. Those are few and far between.
Dick Lochte
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