In 1991, John J. McKeon’s first novel, The Serpent’s Crown, was called “powerful, riveting and timely” by the New York Times Book Review. But shortly thereafter he became engrossed in a quarter-century career as a freelance business journalist. He’s recently started focusing exclusively on fiction again and has a story entitled “The Great Wolf” in EQMM’s next issue, July/August 2024 (on sale June 11). The story turns around a writer and his career, so the following post, in which the author reflects on the current state of the fiction marketplace, ties right in.   —Janet Hutchings

I belong to a small writers’ group that has been meeting for monthly dinners at Chinese restaurants for thirty-plus years now. My personal marker: After one of our first meetings we lingered to watch O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco lead a police armada along the L.A. freeways. An early example of “you can’t make this stuff up.”

We also share a large beach house every fall for a week of writing and bickering. We don’t “workshop” stories or even swap manuscripts much. We’ve all published (in some cases published a lot), and our interests are pretty diverse.

What we don’t talk about, much, is writing. We’ve all done it and will do it again. Besides, we’re really not good at much else.

The one thing, though, that we do blabber on about is the evergreen topic of who’s publishing what, and where, and for how much.

That, and who/what we should read next. However stressed the publishing industry can sometimes appear, it definitely keeps readers supplied with new tales. 

I’ve often had the experience of stumbling on a mystery or thriller that I’ve enjoyed, only to find it’s number nine in a seventeen-book series . . . and counting. The number of ongoing mystery series is truly daunting, as a visit to the bookstore at almost any writers’ conference will demonstrate.

Add in the increasing ease and quality of self-publishing options, and the result can only be described as a boom.

Readers can choose among an impressive cast of detectives to find the sleuth of their dreams.

Some are good with their fists and know exactly where to get an untraceable gun. Others whip up a peerless martini and sling quips with suave abandon. Still others figure out the whole befuddling puzzle without leaving their fireside armchair.

Then there are the amateurs who solve crimes with sheer persistence and common sense, generally impeded by a dense police detective.

A would-be mystery writer could easily conclude that we live in a golden age. Online submission engines generate dozens of pubs open to our work, and it seems that new mystery magazines are springing up all the time, especially when we consider the web-only publications. Facebook regularly fills my timeline with calls for submissions and recommendations that I join groups dedicated to matching writers with outlets.

It might seem that mystery writers today have more places to publish than ever before, and anyone who isn’t getting stuff out there regularly just isn’t trying.

This outpouring of published mystery fiction is good for writers, of course.

Or is it? Raymond Chandler, as long ago as 1944, wrote in The Atlantic[i] about the “production of detective stories on so large a scale, and by writers whose immediate reward is small and whose need of critical praise is almost nil.”

He added: “The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average — or only slightly above average — detective story does.”

Except that today, the average novel does get published, thanks to self-publishing. The old, idealized model of selling a work to a “name” commercial publisher, having it come out in hardcover and appear on bookstore shelves, being reviewed in prominent places, and so forth . . . for the vast majority of aspiring authors, that’s just gone. In its place we have self-publishing.

Depending on what source you consult, millions of self-published books appear annually. All aimed at a public whose average member, according to recent surveys, might or might not read one book a year.

Most editors, when asked, will describe themselves as overwhelmed by their submission queues, and underwhelmed by the quality of what they’re seeing.

With so very, very much out there, why do we keep trying to add to it? In part, I suppose, we see this tsunami of the humdrum as a chance to shine by comparison. The secret is to figure out how.

As the pubs always advise, I read a lot of mystery mags, novels, and online stories, to see what kinds of things are being bought and published. And I’ve been noticing something interesting.

A striking number of the stories I have most enjoyed—the most engaging and satisfying stories—don’t really hinge at all on what we would conventionally think of as “detective work.”

In one story, a guy hides under a bed while someone is murdered in the next room. After a period of cowering, he gets up, looks around, gathers his own stuff and goes on with his day. 

In another, the narrator has a date with a woman who tells him she thinks she’s being followed by a hitman. They talk about it, they walk home, he kisses her good night. Next day it’s in the news that someone broke into the woman’s apartment and murdered her.

I found numerous other examples: Stories in which suspects, interviews, stakeouts, red herrings and other conventions of the gumshoe trade are conspicuously absent.

Yet I could not stop reading. In the first example, I felt every bit of the narrator’s dread as he “ear-witnessed” a murder. In the second, the narrator’s retrospective anguish over what he could have/should have done made for a lot of emotional impact.

Maybe all these examples show is a further blurring of the line between “mystery stories” and “stories.” Tales whose protagonists are passive recipients of information from others are hardly new. That’s how Oedipus was undone, after all, and that story has held up pretty well.

It may be true that there are only six basic plots (or seven, or nine, or 36, depending on who’s counting.) It may indeed be impossible to come up with anything really new.

So in our quest to stand out, perhaps we should concentrate on characters for a while, or setting, or writing style, or . . .

Or perhaps something completely otherworldly, ridiculous, impossible will play out on our TV screens while we sip our favorite beverage . . .

Or something. One way or the other, we’ll keep writing, largely because we can’t imagine not writing.

It’s what we do.

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[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1944/12/the-simple-art-of-murder/656179/