murder.booklocker.com

I had an interesting opportunity to speak with one of my readers this morning. Nope, not one of those email things. Just sitting quietly across from each other with a cup of coffee. I’ve posted the full text of the interview on my website but thought I’d share a couple of impressions here.

First off, I guess I never really thought about strong prejudices when it came to mysteries, even though I admit to at least one myself. I hate gratuituous violence. Most of the time I struggle with violence period. Guess that’s why, with one exception, all the murders in PARK RIDGE are pretty low-key. But that’s not the prejudice I’m talking about. I’m not even talking about the “whodunnit” versus the “whydunnit,” although that did come up in the interview.

My reader said, “I work hard, am always with people, and don’t want to have to dig for deep meanings when I read a mystery. I want to be entertained.”

To be fair, she qualified entertainment with the word “light” a bit later in the conversation. We even made a list of how to know you have a “light” read when you pull a book off the shelf in the mystery section of the library. We decided if it had “cat” in the title, etc. 

I confess that I was surprised to think that folks didn’t just pull books off shelves, give them a scan, then take it home and see what they had. Guess my partner has me trained well! When we fetch our ten books home, some are light, some heavy duty, some in-between. Patricia Cornwell is never light but an awesomely entertaining read for me.

So this idea of not reading for meanings, or not wanting to dig deep, bewilders me. A Dark Adapted Eye, the first novel by Ruth Rendell under the pen name Barbara Vine, was really heavy duty. When the murder finally happened, it struck me as almost anti-climactic. The whole essence of the story was in the convoluted family relationships and interactions. [Made into a movie in 1994] Twenty years later (or is it more?) Rendell/Vine did the same thing in The Minotaur (2004).

Not that I don’t understand about “light” entertainment. I do. I just haven’t written that kind of book. At least, not this time around