Crime, Mysteries & Thrillers discussion

I came across this article(LINKS BELOW) a couple of days ago, so I read a few other articles on gender and writing. It got me thinking about what I read and what I chose NOT to read. So I thought I would through it out to the group. For the ladies in the group are you more likely to read a book written by a woman, or featuring a female protagonist? For the gents: if a book is written by a woman or features a female lead/detective do you put it down and keep going? For the writers in the group, when writing a character that is not the same gender as you, does it effect your writing style/tone? If I were to give you a book(but did not tell you the author) could you tell if it was written by a man or a woman?

http://jezebel.com/5966528/want-to-be...

https://medium.com/on-publishing/e87e...



When I was younger I only read books written by women, of course this excluded school readings. In high school I started expanding my horizons and reading books written by men. Today most of favorites are men.

I don't select or reject a book based on the author. It never enters into the equation.

I never go for a book because of who wrote it. I always look at the blurb for the storyline.

Most of my favorite authors are women, but I will pick up books by men- I loved the Lincoln Perry series by Michael Koryta, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer, and the Accidental Adventures by C. Alexander London.

I was talking to a friend(who gave me the idea for this question) and he said he usually doesn't like books written by men where the lead character/protagonist is a women because he doesn't feel its "authentic." I don't know how I feel about that.

I think J.K. Rowling did a good job of writing in a "mannish" style. She avoided excessive detail about clothing, furniture, and those type of things which scream "woman" to me.

I don't read books based by gender authors. If the synopses sound good I read it.

I never pay much attention to the author's gender myself. I think a good writer can convincingly write both genders.

Erin *Paperback Stash* wrote: "I never pay much attention to the author's gender myself. I think a good writer can convincingly write both genders."

You're right about that. I think J.K. Rowling did a good job writing the opposite sex in Harry Potter.

This articles dovetails nicely into a discussion of gender and writing.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/boo...


Where Is the Great American Novel by a Woman?

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on pressing and provocative questions about the world of books. This week, Jennifer Szalai and Mohsin Hamid challenge notions of what makes certain literature “great.”

By Jennifer Szalai

The label “Great American Novel” has shown itself elastic enough to include or exclude, depending on who’s doing the labeling.
Jennifer Szalai
Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Jennifer Szalai

“Great,” in the context of the American novel, is so often supposed to convey both merit and magnitude, and for some reason our lists of celebrated chroniclers have skewed conspicuously male: DeLillo, Pynchon, Bellow, Mailer and Roth, to name just a few contenders. Toni Morrison may have received top honors in the Book Review’s 2006 lit-world poll of “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years,” but it was hard not to notice how, out of a final tally of 22 nominees receiving multiple votes, Morrison’s “Beloved” and Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” were the only books by women.

So do “Beloved” and “Housekeeping” qualify as Great American Novels? We could marshal arguments for and against, or dig up books by women that have been underappreciated or forgotten, but it seems to me that answering the question so directly is evasive and, ultimately, a waste of time. When Mailer went to the trouble of describing women’s writing as “always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid,” my guess is he wasn’t looking to be persuaded otherwise. If some readers emerge from adolescence with a boys-against-girls mentality intact, why bother scavenging for exceptions to their treehouse rules?

Rather than agonizing over specific examples, we could take a closer look at our long-running national obsession. The label “Great American Novel” has shown itself elastic enough to include or exclude, depending on who’s doing the labeling. One of the earliest uses of the term can be traced to the 19th-century novelist John William De Forest, who in 1868 equated it with a “picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” He praised only one book for having “a national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking and plenty of strong feeling”: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In other words, De Forest decided a novel by a woman came closest to “painting the American soul.”

Stowe is one of only a handful of women writers to be anointed this way, and even then, her position in the American canon has been shaky. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has been called everything from an example of the “highest art flowing from love of God and man” (according to an effusive Leo Tolstoy) to, in James Baldwin’s words, a “very bad novel.” It has been scorned for its flagrant sentimentality, derided as artless schlock. The Great American Novel has since been cast in terms of intellectual daring and authenticity; sentimentality is for the birds, so it seems.

Or maybe critics tend to bristle at sentimentality of a particular kind. The scholar Nina Baym has pointed out how “stories of female frustration are not perceived as commenting on, or containing, the essence of our culture.” Stories of male frustration, on the other hand — especially those “melodramas of beset manhood” in which men struggle with the siren call of comfort and domesticity — jibe more neatly with what we expect serious literature to be. Men’s self-discovery is hunting for big game; women’s self-discovery amounts to tidying up around the house.

This cave man division of labor should sound ridiculous, yet it retains some currency in the literary marketplace — the sliver conferring prestige, that is, rather than sales. I also wonder what purpose is currently served by an ideal that originated in the 19th century, at a time when American identity was still being forged in the shadow of the Old World and the Civil War. Instead of the Great American Novel, maybe we should be talking more about our Great American Fixation, the insistent desire to find the book that tells us who we are. How we define that search — what counts, what doesn’t — has said as much about “the American soul” as any novel that’s supposed to do the same.

Jennifer Szalai was until 2010 a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine, where she oversaw the publication’s “Reviews” section. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation and The London Review of Books, among others.

? ? ?

By Mohsin Hamid

Drop the “American.” Great fiction attains wisdom and craftsmanship so exalted as to exceed our petty nationalisms.
Mohsin Hamid
Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Mohsin Hamid

Where is the Great American Novel by a woman? Well, have a look at your bookshelf.

What else are those mind-blowing late-20th-century works by such American women as, among others, Kingston and Kingsolver, Morrison and Robinson, L’Engle and Le Guin, if not great novels? And in our own still-young 21st century, much of the most interesting American writing I, at least, happen to read seems to be coming from women, including Jennifer Egan, Julie Otsuka, A. M. Homes and Karen Russell. (Nor is this a United States-specific phenomenon: over in Britain, where I served as a judge for this year’s BBC National Short Story Award, we found ourselves announcing an all-woman shortlist.)

Ah, I’ve heard it said too often, those women-written books may be fine, there may be some good American novels among them, even great American novels, but they aren’t the Great American Novel. So I’ve come to make an announcement. There is no such thing.

The point of there being a notion of the Great American Novel is to elevate fiction. It’s a target for writers to aim at. It’s a mythological beast, an impossible mountaintop, a magical vale in the forest, a place to get storytellers dreaming of one day reaching. It keeps you warm when times are cold, and times in the world of writing for a living are mostly cold.

But if the idea of the Great American Novel is blinding us to exquisite fiction written by women, then perhaps its harm is exceeding its usefulness. Attempt, therefore, to resist the admittedly rich resonances that attach to the fact that a Muslim-named man who lives in Pakistan is performing this task, and bear with me as I advocate the death of the Great American Novel.

The problem is in the phrase itself. “Great” and “Novel” are fine enough. But “the” is needlessly exclusionary, and “American” is unfortunately parochial. The whole, capitalized, seems to speak to a deep and abiding insecurity, perhaps a colonial legacy. How odd it would be to call Homer’s “Iliad” or Rumi’s “Masnavi” “the Great Eastern Mediterranean Poem.”

Elevated fiction reaches for transcendence. “Gatsby’s” beauty, “Blood Meridian’s” beauty, “Beloved’s” beauty don’t lie in their capturing something quintessentially American, for there is no such thing. These novels reveal an America too vast and diverse to support unitary narratives. They split atoms to reveal galaxies. Their beauties lie in attaining wisdom and craftsmanship so exalted as to exceed our petty nationalisms — so exalted, in other words, as to be human.

This wisdom may come from Americans and be set in America, but it is bigger than notions of black or white, male or female, American or non. Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.

It’s a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves. Otherwise, why imagine at all? So drop the caps. Drop the “the.” Drop the “American.” Unless you think you’re working on the Great American Novel. In which case, if it helps, keep the notion of it alive in your heart, no longer as a target to hit, but as the gravity you must defy to break from orbit and soar into space.

We’re out here. Waiting for you. Foreigners. Freaks, every last one. Your laws call us aliens. But you know better. You’ve grappled with the freakiness within. You’re part of us. And we of you.

Welcome, American. Now tell us about Topeka. Or Taiwan. And, by the way, have you brought along a copy of the latest Oates?

Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels: “Moth Smoke,” a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a New York Times best seller that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and, most recently, “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.”

And again. Quote from Elanor Catton, Man Booker Prize winner 2013 for her book The Luminaries.


http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...


excerpt:

"With the prize also comes that mixed blessing, fame, and she's already bothered by the uneven treatment accorded to men and women in the public eye.

"I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," she says. "In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime."

And then there is the question of her youth. Though generally well-received in Britain, The Luminaries, she said, was subject to a "bullying" reception from certain male reviewers of an older generation – particularly in her native New Zealand. "People whose negative reaction has been most vehement have all been men over about 45," she says.

"One of those things that you learn in school about any kind of bullying is that it's always more to do with them than it is to do with you. I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting."

It is the peculiar constellation of her age, gender and the particular nature of The Luminaries that has, she believes, provoked "a sense of irritation from some critics – that I have been so audacious to have taken up people's time by writing a long book. There's a sense in there of: 'Who do you think you are? You can't do that.' Something else related to that is to do with the omniscient third person narration of the book. There's a feeling of: 'All right, we can tolerate [this] from a man over 50, but we are not going to be spoken to like that by you.'"

I mostly read books by men. But I occasionally read books by women. And I occasionally read books with female leads.

So long as I am enjoying the book I don't care who wrote it.

Gender of the author or protangonist doesn't figure in my decision to read a book.

I'm a male author writing about a female protagonist, working in a male-dominated occupation (at least, that's how it seems). So far, nobody thought Katla (or any of the other women in my books) were unrealistic.

Well, as a man, I've written a number of books featuring female protagonists - and I've written them in the first person. I don't know if that bothers anyone else. But it wasn't a problem for me.

In terms of reading, I don't really care if the author is a man or a woman. If I made a list of my favorite authors - Michael Connelly, Sue Grafton, Dennis Lehane, Sandra Brown - it would probably be about 50-50. The Kennedy Connection: A Gil Malloy Novel

Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs was an example of a very good book with a male character written in the first person by a woman author. It worked!

The gender of the author or protagonist doesn't matter to me. If the book sounds interesting, that's what makes me decide to read it.

This is a really good question! I had to think about this for a few minutes. - As an older woman, I've noticed that I'm reading a good amount of both genders.

I recall when I was younger (12 years old and up), I was reading mostly romance and light mysteries that my grandmother kept handing me. She was a huge fan of women authors. was my very first light mystery and I still have a copy of it. It was then that I started reading more mysteries with young girls in them, didn't care for the boys. Nancy Drew, etc.

In my 20's I gravitated toward Danielle Steel and Kathrine Stone and LOVED SEXY MEN! I didn't particularly like reading a lot about gung ho women like Xena.

In my 30's and 40's it became more mixed. My mother introduced me to my first male authors in Crime, Suspense and Thrillers (Richard North Patterson and Dean Koontz.) I like a variation of both, strong women and male characters. Today, for the life of me I can't sit down and get through main or lead character who is a timid and submissive homemaker, can't do it! Want to know a little secret?

For a couple of years, and several of his books later, I thought Robin Cook was a woman writer before I finally glanced at the back of a hard cover one time. Oops. So no, I can't say that I have the ability to guess the gender of the writer, but now that you mention it, I might start trying that!

Sadly all my life I've not been a follower of individual authors but rather their works. I've only recently been intrigued with the creators of the stuff I like enough to remember their names or join their pages. I like both male and female written books, probably equally as much. I do also think that there are clear differences in the writing style and tone of both but typically that doesn't bother me.

Romance is a female dominated genre that just isn't for me. I really liked one book in particular, Jessica Park's Flat Out Love because it was mostly grounded with likable characters but those romance tropes annoy the hell out of me but female readers eat them right up.

The thing about gender is you may think a book is written by a male/female and actually written by a female/male. It's because of assumptions that are made that men don't write/read romance and female don't write/read hard-boiled mysteries or adventure.

I'm guilty of thinking of this myself. So many use pseudonyms. I just feel this is a very negative way to look at things. I love action/adventure, mystery, AND romance.

I like to think the gender of the author/protagonist doesn't make a difference to me, but who knows what goes on in my subconscious?

I think history shows that assumptions and stereotypes about who-reads-what--are still as largely true now as they were then. You can always find a small minority of exceptions when discussing trends so broad. Nevertheless, most of the leisure industry (films, books, magazines, movies, tv) would not run as efficiently as they do, were it not for carefully-built up rubrics which have been measured and validated over time.

Sure, you might find some women today who read thrillers; certainly, women read mysteries. But how many men read romances? Practically nil. Just about as many as you will find purchasing cosmetics. Or, consider the porn industry: it was never women who funneled billions of dollars into porn. Historically, it is never men who spend wads of cash on fashion. Why does admitting these 'norms' bother anyone?

The question raised by the OP does indeed have many aspects. In English literature there was--for a long time, and to some extent still is--a rather snobbish condescension towards female authors. The blunt--rather rude--claim was muttered, that 'women authors never seem to get male psychology quite right'. Here again, you could certainly find some glaring exceptions. George Eliot, Edith Wharton, etc. But apart from an obvious few, how many? Whereas, (it was said) male authors who mastered the knack of describing female psychology were found in droves. Dozens. Hundreds! So there's still a perceived imbalance despite there being no really good reason for it. It's like, Dr. Joyce Brothers becoming a boxing expert--fine, but there needs to be more similar examples.

All this ^^^ is probably moot. I added it simply for context. When it comes to genre-writing (such as mystery, crime, suspense) we can certainly say that women authors have shone, have done exceptionally well, have measured up nicely. In the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (the 1930s) female writers even took center stage. Christie, Tey, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham. They ruled the world of mysteries, and in suspense fiction too--very, very adroit.

Speaking for myself personally though--I'll readily confess that in one area of fiction--the action-thriller--I never look for anything by a woman author. If I happen to have a thriller in my hand--with a female by-line--I'll pass it up. I'll set it back down on the table. I've read a lot of thrillers and I just don't think women master this format effectively. This is one area where male psychology is innately better understood...by men.

It's this way: male characters in a thriller are often crude, violent, crass, pigs. Vicious, atavistic, filthy. I don't find authoresses quite convey the nuances of male psychology at this low-level. But it's precisely these traits which make great thrillers work. Cold-blooded killing machines without a shred of compassion, that's what I want in a thriller. I've never read a convincing war story by a female; and that's a bias I don't see any need to shed. Not handing out diss/snub here--its to the credit of women that they don't grasp how men are at our worst, our stupidest, our most barbaric. Women are supposed to be more intelligent/less bestial than we are and thankfully, I usually find that to be true.

Turn it around, and I still feel its fair: for instance, if a man would try to author a string of novels about childbirth, women would have every right to sneer and dismiss it out-of-hand. What can any man know about gestation in the womb? They might be able to describe it from any number of external POVs--but not from personal experience.

So--like it or not, I feel men still have 'their zone' and women still have theirs. And I don't think there's anything wrong with recognizing this. Our brains and bodies are different, our behavior is not similar--why is it impolitic to affirm this? There are respective strengths and gifts distributed to us all--by gender-- which modernity will not overturn. I say vive le diffrans..I wouldn't enjoy an androgynous society at all.

Feliks wrote: "I think history shows that assumptions and stereotypes about who-reads-what--are still as largely true now as they were then. You can always find a small minority of exceptions when discussing tren..."

I think you're making an assumption about men that may not be true. One of the great impacts of the e-reader is that people can read books that they might not have before because they were embarassed to let people see what they were reading.

I think, generally speaking, there is a gender difference. However, I think it's less of an impact than it was in times past.

Kirsten wrote: "I think you're making an assumption about men that may not be true. ..."

I think I'm on pretty safe ground. You can buy toiletries discreetly on-line; but men suddenly haven't started purchasing make-up; you can watch movies discreetly in the privacy of your own home via Netflix--but men have not suddenly started buying chick-flicks. Why would books be some kind of exception to gender behavior, when its not paired with any other unusual variance of this type?

Kirsten wrote: "One of the great impacts of the e-reader is that people can read books that they might not have before because they were embarassed to let people see what they were reading..."

Yes, I agree with you there--but this very thing strikes me as one of the more horrible aspects of it. It closes off a social discourse. Killing conversations about books, cinching off a whole sphere of interaction and engagement. It used to be that you could strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, based on a bookcover. But I wouldn't assume that men are taking advantage of this newfound anonyminity to explore their feminine side.

Kirsten wrote: "However, I think it's less of an impact than it was in times past...."

I think this is mainly in the highly-visible, safe, patrolled areas of society (e.g., the American media, the make-believe world of the internet, the trendy downtown sector of any US city). Anyplace which is very 'monitored' --the workplace, or on a train--anyplace where a lawsuit can be filed. But in rural, suburban, small town, and low-income city neighborhoods where I go, I see very little change.

It does? We're having quite a discussion here.

Yep. The OP sure chose a family-sized can of worms with his topic :D

Some examples: I saw a minor bar-fight break out two months ago (the last time I did a pub crawl) and loud, ugly, non-pc slurs were being hurled all over the place, vociferously, all the way outside into the street. No one took it amiss; its still part of the norm.

Basically, when someone starts pounding on you, they are not going to stop because you remonstrate with them that they are behind-the-times. If you reach for your cellphone--you get beaten down even more.

Further, if you demonstrate cowardice/weakness, if you hide behind bureaucrats to save your skin--then, no female in the neighborhood is going to have anything to do with you. The bottom line is that courage and heart still count, when it comes to being a man in this world.

In that same bar, women routinely experience 'unwanted, disrespectful touching' and the guys who do that, are tossed out of the bar. (By other guys, not by the women who are outraged).

Basically, respect still matters--because respect determines behavior--and respect is backed up by force. I don't know why anyone thinks any of this is ever going to alter: deeds always count more than words. Doing the right thing.

You can also see hatreds-galore if you ever look over a kid's shoulder as he's playing any on-line shooter game where there's a 'chatroom' setup for the players to talk to each other. Its as foul as a dockyard or a prison exercise yard.

I just read the summary to see if it sounds interesting. I have never really thought about reading a book by one gender more than the other.

I never base what I choose to read based on the gender of the author nor the gender of characters. I'm female for the record.

Loretta wrote: "I don't base my reading choices on the gender of the author or the gender of the main character. I read the book if sounds interesting, period."

Same