You say crime, I say SF

The issue of genre 'pigeonholes' raised its head again for me this week.  With fellow Pentangle Press writers Carol Westron and Christine Hammacott, we were interviewed by a reporter from the Portsmouth News for an article on Pentangle Press's second birthday,

As part of our development we are about to set up a panel to speak at writing events, to market ourselves as writers.  Carol wants to call me a future crime writer for the purposes of this.  It makes sense, as we cover past, present, and future crime then, but it isn't really who I am.  

I spent a year going to crime conferences and reading in that genre, and it didn't take me long to realise that I don't belong there.  I hated the idea of my books being marketed by covers dripping with blood, and I just wasn't engaged by many of the stories.  Some of them even depressed me.  And one thriller writer (a massive best-seller) appalled me with the casual and totally unnecessary violence he put in his work.

And yet, at their heart, many of my books do contain crimes.  Eyemind has my main character Keri Starseer being hired to investigate dodgy interactive artworks.  She's an artist, not a law enforcer, but she's subjected to attempts to brainwash her and is kidnapped and beaten.  In my novel Jade the proposed crime is the rape of a sentient planet.  In my novel Snowbird, the crimes are fraud and illegal exploitation of a sentient species. In the second book of that series, Darius, it is the sabotage of the orbital shipyard, the murder of a starship, and attempted rape.

The crimes that occur in my books are many and varied, and yet, I'm still not a crime writer.  I don't feel comfortable with that label.  My heart belongs in the ideas around the crimes I write about, not in the investigation of the crimes themselves.  And I want starships and beautiful starfields on my covers, not blood.

This is one of the downsides of being pigeonholed into a genre.  I am sure there are a great many crime writers whose stories I would enjoy, if they were not packaged as crime.  And there are probably many crime readers who would enjoy my novels.  But the chances are that we won't discover each other's work.  This is the downside of being forced into a genre.  We can only be one thing there, when In fact we might be several.  We might be SF and crime, like me, or romance and crime, like several of Carol Westron's books, or SF and romance.  Life is richer than strict genre boundaries, and our stories should reflect this.