I was asked repeatedly at Bouchercon, “what do you write?” While my writing colleagues and established fans know that I write in the two genres of historical adventure and global crisis thrillers, the general theme of the Bouchercon conference is mystery writing. So, I attended as an outlier, to meet a new audience and to learn more about mystery and crime writing.
What I found was surprising. The overlap of mystery and thriller writing is amazing. There are some differences however. While mystery tends to be confined to narrow settings, thrillers more often include multiple wide settings. (My Team Walker series may take a reader to four or five settings spread over thousands of miles.) Mystery writers tend to have fewer characters, and those characters often have more developed quirky traits than thriller protagonists and antagonists. Mystery writers do a more thorough job of explaining why the bad guys are bad than most thriller writers; they want the reader to connect with, if not sympathize somewhat with them. I do the same in both genres because my personal experience is that in the real world both sides can be fighting for something they believe in.
It occurred to me on the long flight back to Alaska that the reason new potential Rodger Carlyle readers wanted to know about my writing is to provide them an idea of whether they should invest their hard-earned dollars in my books. I can’t expect them, especially those whose focus was on mysteries, to open one of my books unless they know where I’m coming from and how that might affect the joy that should come from a good book. I shared who I am, what I believe, and what I write, and the reception was great. (One of my books, Two Civil Wars, sold more books at Bouchercon than at all other sales platforms in the last three months.)
Both readers and fellow writers were intrigued by the complex good guy-bad guy relationships in The Shadow Game, which pits Iranian expats against both the USA and Iran. While I could not reveal much about the upcoming Team Walker book, the fact that it takes on the complex USA-Mexico-China relationships led to several new readers offering to read Advanced Reader Copies when they come out next month. Readers want to know what they are buying. Many, like Carmen and I, have a strong connection to Mexico and worry about the cartels and about Chinese influence on the drug trade.
Which leads me to one more thought while sitting on this Alaska Airlines jet. There was a time in American politics when the voters demanded to know what candidates stood for, what their real goals and policy initiatives would be if elected. Many voters today are like the book buyers who only look at a book’s cover before deciding to buy or pass. They remind me of the “reader” I met at Bouchercon who commented, “I only read the first two or three chapters of the last few books I bought. They were terrible.” Perhaps that’s why our country is struggling. American political elites have relegated our election process to producing book covers.