Mystery & Detective

By Andrew Grabois - Jul 30 , 2007

Mystery & Detective fiction are really two separate branches of crime fiction. Crime fiction concerns itself with crimes, those who commit them, and those who investigate them. Mystery fiction is usually a murder mystery, though it doesn’t have to be; detective fiction focuses on the investigation of crimes by paid or amateur investigators. Detective fiction can be broken down into finer sub-genres like Whodunit, private eye, English, police procedurals, hardboiled, noir, and the cozy. The immense popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code may have given rise to yet another sub-genre, the religious mystery, but we’ll have to see if it’s still around a few years from now.

Mystery & Detective fiction can trace their beginnings to the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 19th century. These and other early practitioners of the genre had their works serialized in the new illustrated literary magazines with mass audiences. The 1920’s saw the rise of Agatha Christie, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew. Like science fiction, mysteries and crime fiction were given a tremendous boost by the popularity of pulp magazines and radio plays in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Television caused the pulps to disappear in the 1950’s, but it also created an even greater interest in the genre and, ultimately, a much larger market overall.

According to Simba Information’s annual report, Business of Consumer Book Publishing, the Mystery & Detective category generated an estimated $422 million dollars in 2006, an increase of more than 4% over 2005, and 17% over 2002. Consumer dollars spent on Mystery & Detective books accounted for 6.7% of all consumer dollars spent on books last year. The top five revenue-generating publishers rang up $371 million in sales, or 88% of all dollars spent in the category. The top houses were Random House, Penguin Group, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and St. Martin’s Press. Random House and Penguin Group alone accounted for more than 52% of the total.

The Simba estimates are all we have. There are no market studies of mystery or crime fiction. Publishers Weekly hasn’t done a category closeup on mystery books since 1999. What we do have, though, are Library Journal’s annual book buying surveys. Libraries, you see, are a huge market for genre fiction. According to LJ’s 2007 survey, the nation’s 10,000 public libraries spend about half of their entire book budgets on adult fiction, up from about a third just two years ago. And the lion’s share of dollars spent on adult fiction goes toward buying genre fiction, of which mysteries are the most popular (highest rates of borrowing). For years, one of the dirty little secrets in the public library world was that even though adult fiction typically accounted for more than half of all borrowed books, librarians did not buy to meet that demand.

Faced with competition from the Internet and other diversions in recent years, libraries have begun to think of their patrons more like customers, and that means giving the people what they want. In a mature market like book publishing, it is a zero sum game: The more books that are borrowed from public libraries (or bought used), the fewer that are purchased new. Not a good long term trend for publishers.

According to Bowker’s Books In Print database, 5,580 new Mystery & Detective titles and editions were published in the U.S. in 2006, a 9% increase over 2005 and a 33% increase over 2002. The peak year for the category was 2004, when 5,715 new titles and editions were published. Below is a graph charting the trend of new Mystery & Detective books published between 2002 and 2006:

Of the 5,580 new Mystery & Detective titles published in 2006:

• 22% were mass market editions
• 23% were hardcovers
• 44% were trade paper editions
• 13% were published for children and young adults
• 37% were reviewed in at last one source monitored by Bowker
• 7% appeared on at least one bestseller list monitored by Bowker

Janet Evanovich currently rules the Mystery & Detective roost. Her latest Stephanie Plum novel, Lean Mean Thirteen, is flying high on all the major bestseller lists. Twelve Sharp, her previous title in the series, is out now in mass market paperback and is also doing very well. Evanovich is a Jersey Girl who started out writing steamy romances under the pen name Steffie Hall. The romances were modestly successful, but Evanovich hit pay dirt when she created Stephanie Plum, an unemployed lingerie buyer from Trenton who takes up bounty hunting to pay the bills.

Joining Evanovich on the short list is James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown; Martin Cruz Smith’s Stalin’s Ghost; Ruth Rendell’s The Water’s Lovely; Michael Connelly’s The Overlook; J. A. Jance’s Justice Denied; and John Sanford’s Invisible Prey.

There is no shortage of deals for new Mystery/Crime books. My favorites from Michael Cader’s deals database follow below with original descriptions:

• Southern Persuasion, by T. Lynn Ocean. A security specialist fights the clock to locate a terrorist cell and stop the murder of a high-powered diplomat in town for his daughter’s wedding — while having to resist her partner’s sex appeal, and tolerate her eccentric father and his poker buddies’ bizarre schemes. (St. Martin’s)
• The Plunder Room, by John Jeter. A blueblood paraplegic must salvage his family’s proud Southern heritage. (Thomas Dunne Books)
• Grim Sweeper, by Christy Barritt. A crime-scene cleaner gets more than she bargained for when she finds Elvis — dead and still wearing his blue suede shoes. (Kregel)
• Little Shop Of Murders, by Susan Goodwill. Two women are robbed at the bank by a bathrobe-clad octogenarian. (Midnight Ink)
• Frankly, My Dear, I’m Dead, by Livia Washburn. An amateur sleuth and travel agent leads a tour of Atlanta sites connected to Margaret Mitchell and GONE WITH THE WIND, but her group really gets an eyeful when the Rhett Butler impersonator ends up dead. (Kensington)
• Killer Poker: This Game Is Murder, by John Vorhaus. A genre-bending how-to whodunit that leads the reader through a mystery while at the same time teaching him the higher aspects of topflight tournament poker. (Kensington)
• On The Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery, by Tom Schreck. A not-so-social social worker who moonlights as an underdog boxer tries to save a kidnapped girl and foil a terrorist plot with just the help of his disobedient basset hound and his four drunk friends. (Midnight Ink)