Should I subtweet about a sensitive topic in my genre?
Polls remain open but I think I see a trend.
OK, call the election board because I have an impending date with a school project and have to follow through on this.
OK, so across all literary genres, we are inevitably building on traditions established by privileged people, who tended to be white and cisgender.
But crime fiction has a particular problem: The traditional crime novel is actually quite conservative. It presumes that the status quo is worth restoring.
If we can figure out who disrupted the existing order (via murder, other crimes) all is well.
Crime fiction is currently being written by people who span generations from pre-Boomer to millennial. The older generations skew white and heterosexual.
In fact, crime fiction for many years has skewed pretty old. But that's changing, which has been all to the genre's benefit. No young writers, no young readers -- that's not a good thing. That's how genres die.
PI fiction, in particular, was MORIBUND when 3 women saved it.
It has benefitted enormously from expanding ideas about who the PI is.
But let's not kid ourselves, there is a lot of work to do. And that needs to be acknowledged.
That starts at the "top."
We need to rethink everything about private eyes. How we define them, what they do, whether their job is to restore the old order or create a new one.
I think you know what I think needs to happen.
