Passport to Mystery

Global crime fiction tackles dark social issues, mystery backlists go digital
by: Wilda Williams

Mystery and suspense fiction remain as popular as ever for as many reasons as there are readers. “Those who wish for escape or respite read cozies, historicals, or romance crossovers,” says Poisoned Pen editor Barbara Peters. “Those who want to stay on the cutting edge of society read thrillers [from authors] like Daniel Silva, Alex Berenson, or James Rollins.”

When she acquires manuscripts, Peters strives for the middle ground with an eye to long-term appeal, but as a bookseller she has a front-seat view of the genre's current direction, which she sees as going ever more global.

South Africa rising

One rising star is South Africa, which Soho Press publisher Bronwen Hruska believes is set to explode on the U.S. mystery scene. Already garnering starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and LJ is Jassy Mackenzie's series debut Random Violence (Soho Crime, Apr.) about a private detective who returns to her native Johannesburg to help solve a crime.

“The voice is strong, the story is compelling, and Mackenzie takes an unflinching look at what it's really like to live in Johannesburg today,” explains Hruska. This summer, Hruska will reissue the first two titles in James McClure's long-out-of-print classic series about Afrikaner detective Tromp Kramer and Zulu sergeant Mickey Zondi: The Steam Pig (Jul.) and The Caterpillar Cop (Aug.).

“It was a conscious decision to publish McClure and Mackenzie on the same list—an opportunity to compare and contrast apartheid and postapartheid South Africa,” says Soho's publisher. “One thing that's clear from reading both authors is that South Africa is, and has been, a country rife with crime and violence.”

Other talented writers mining this dark material include “King of South African crime” Deon Meyer (Thirteen Hours, Atlantic, Sept.), Wessel Ebersohn (The October Killings, Minotaur, Oct. 2011), and Malla Nunn (Let the Dead Lie, Washington Square: S. & S., Apr.). Born of mixed-race parents in neighboring Swaziland and now an Australian citizen, Nunn explores the dire consequences of apartheid in her acclaimed Edgar Award–nominated debut, A Beautiful Place To Die.

Even Hollywood has taken notice. Later this year in Cape Town, director Philip Noyce (The Quiet American) will film Roger Smith's acclaimed noir thriller Mixed Blood (LJ 12/08), with Samuel L. Jackson starring as Zulu detective Disaster Zondi. Smith (see Q&A, p. 23), who read McClure's mysteries as a teenager, says his protagonist is a small tribute to Mickey Zondi.

Scandinavia still riding the wave?

Despite talk last year about declining sales (see “The Great Escape,” LJ 4/15/09), the Nordic crime wave has not yet crested. For example, Norwegian author Jo Nesbø's Nemesis was shortlisted for this year's Edgar Award for Best Novel. Henning Mankell's The Man from Beijing immediately landed on the New York Times best sellers list on its publication in February. And even though the final volume of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is set for May, so many impatient U.S. fans ordered the UK edition of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Knopf) that it tied last fall for the number five spot on the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's best sellers list.

Coming in August is Karin Fossum's new psychological thriller Broken (Houghton Harcourt) and The Postcard Killers (Little, Brown), the first collaboration between the prolific and best-selling James Patterson and Swedish crime writer Liza Marklund (who also has a four-book deal with Atria: S. & S.). The latter is sure to attract new American readers not usually interested in international mysteries.

“People's appetite for the icy Scandinavian style is still quite powerful,” notes Pegasus Books editor Jessica Case. The June release of The Ice Princess marks the U.S. debut of Camilla Läckberg, Europe's sixth best-selling author (after fellow Swedes Marklund and Larsson). “We really believe someone like Camilla, who combines an incredible cast of characters and setting (the tiny seaside town of Fjallbecka) alongside a sinister mystery, has the potential to bring Scandinavian fiction to an even higher level.” Winner of the 2008 Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (France's most prestigious award for crime fiction), the novel has been sold into 33 countries.

Melville Mysteries joins the lineup

“I have been intrigued to see that people are finally coming around to reading fiction in translation,” says Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson. But he also believes that the novels coming out of Scandinavia have become too much of the thriller, more concerned with violence or technology than with current social or political issues.

Watching as other presses launched crime fiction imprints, Johnson saw an opportunity for his press, best known for literary fiction in translation, to do mysteries that were set in other places but returned to Melville House's literary and political sensibilities. This fall Melville Mysteries, which Johnson compares to the harder-edged Black Lizard, Black Cat, and Serpent's Tail imprints, will kick off with Israeli playwright Joshua Sobel's Cut Throat Dog (Oct.), a literary spy thriller about an ex–Mossad agent, and Jakob Arjouni's Kismet (Oct.), which introduces a Turkish-German private investigator in a gritty Frankfurt locale.

“I think Arjouni's book will go over well with an American audience,” remarks Johnson. “You can tell he's read a lot of Raymond Chandler, lots of gumshoe wise-cracking stuff, but in a very cool setting.” But don't take him lightly; Arjouni, whose award-winning, four-book series is popular in Germany, also explores serious contemporary issues: immigration, organized crime, and the fallout from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

From Russia with love

Akashic Books, which has had great success publishing shorter fiction in translation with its popular Noir anthologies, continues to broaden the series' global scope. Coming in June is Moscow Noir, edited by Natalia Smirnova and Julia Goumen. “It still seems Russia holds an air of mystique for Americans,” says Akashic managing editor Johanna Ingalls. “The two countries have such a long (and often tortured) history, and references to the Cold War continue to this day.”

Simon & Schuster executive VP and publisher David Rosenthal has also noticed more suspense novels than usual set in either contemporary Russia or done as period pieces from the Stalinist era. “People are trying to figure out what the Putin era is all about, and Comrade Joe's days are still relatively unknown.” Rosenthal points to Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko thrillers, which have kept up with Russia's ever-changing politics: “from the repressive communist dictatorship of Gorky Park to the birth of the oligarchs in Wolves Eat Dogs to his upcoming Three Stations (Aug.), where the billionaires are now being harassed by the government.”

Expert at finding new talent and putting marketing muscle behind what Minotaur Books publisher Andrew Martin calls “power debuts,” the Macmillan crime fiction imprint is launching William Ryan's The Holy Thief (Sept.) with a 125,000-copy first printing. In addition, Minotaur for the first time ever will be offering as an exclusive to librarians an e-version of the Advance Reader's Edition. (Go to LJ BookSmack! or MacmillanLibrary.com for details.)

“Our expectation is to make this author a best seller,” says Martin, who compares the novel, the first in a three-book deal, to David Benioff's City of Thieves. Set in Stalin's Russia, it features a world-weary detective who must operate in a crumbling, corrupt system to solve a terrible crime with political implications. In an interesting twist, Martin turned down another Russian-flavored crime novel in favor of Ryan's book.

But Kate Miciak, editorial director of Bantam Books/Delacorte Press, quickly snapped up Sam Eastland's debut, Eye of the Red Tsar (May), about Tsar Nicholas II's chief detective (based on a historical figure) who eventually becomes Stalin's investigator. “Despite the legion of Russian thrillers I've read, I've never read one that so seamlessly binds the fragile luxury of the Romanov period with the dizzying paranoia of the Stalinist regime.”

A little light in the mix

Not all the new foreign mysteries coming this summer are dark social portraits. In July, Kensington is releasing Alexander Campion's The Grave Gourmet, the first entry in a cozy series set in France and featuring a policewoman married to a restaurant critic. And while a small press like Poisoned Pen can't afford much in the way of works in translation, Barbara Peters loves finding novels either with foreign sensibility or books like Simon & Schuster author Tarquin Hall's Vish Puri series (The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing, Jun.), which uses the Indian landscape as the backdrop to a classic mystery plot. Poisoned Pen's big summer debut is Jeanne Matthews's Bones of Contention (Jun.), a riff on the traditional country-house murder mystery set in the Australian outback

A digital crime wave

Last March when Minotaur released Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist, the publisher saw significant ebook sales by week two of the print on-sale date. In fact, the spy thriller was the number one best-selling Macmillan ebook title that week. Minotaur's Martin attributes this to several factors: the Kindle II had just been launched with all the attendant promotion, there was extensive press coverage for Steinhauer's book, and many of the Kindle's early adopters were “big boys with toys.” “Part of the fun of the Kindle,” says Martin, “is the one-click immediate gratification download of a hot book.”

Ebooks were the only bright spot in last year's grim publishing environment, with the American Association of Publishers (AAP) reporting sales jumping an astonishing 176.6 percent in 2009, to $169.5 million. On the other hand, they remain a small percentage of overall trade book sales at just 3.3 percent, though up from 1.2 percent in 2008. But mystery publishers are discovering that the digital format has become a viable sales channel for backlist titles. Steven Pomije, publicity manager for Midnight Ink Books, reports that many older titles whose print sales dropped two or three years ago are now seeing significant ebook sales. This month the publisher will make its top ten mystery Kindle ebooks (headed by G.M. Malliet's 2008 Agatha Award–winning Death of a Cozy Writer) available for the iPad via Kobo and will grow the list from there.

Crediting her marketing director for having the foresight to get Soho Press up on Kindle almost three years ago, Hruska, too, has seen tangible results. Ebook sales now constitute at least 50 percent of Soho's backlist sales and about 25–30 percent of its total sales. “It's not insignificant,” says Hruska, who is now starting to sell through other e-tailers like Sony.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and OverDrive. “And I don't think it's just about crime fiction. Series fiction in any genre is really taking off in ebook form.”

Literary agent and ebook publisher Richard Curtis agrees. His company, E-Reads© (www.ereads.com), specializes in reprints of genre fiction (sf, romance, action adventure, mystery/thriller, etc.) and currently offers about 1000 titles, in all ebook formats and trade paperback via print on demand. “There is a lot more fuel in these old titles than anyone imagined, and our sales support that.” His top-selling mystery authors include Nancy Herndon, Nancy Cohen (licensed from Kensington), Parnell Hall, and Richard S. Prather, but Curtis thinks the genre is underrepresented. He predicts that mysteries will become a big ebook staple as the demographics of Kindle owners trends toward older users.

As the recent Macmillan-Amazon dustup over ebook pricing and availability reveals, issues remain over what distribution models publishers will adopt, especially where libraries are concerned. At a “Publishing Point” Meet Up Group (bit.ly/bRqvoy), Macmillan CEO John Sargent argued that the way ebooks are currently loaned in libraries presents a thorny problem and that the publisher/library relationship might have to be changed. Still, the brave new digital world offers huge opportunities for selling books.

“I think ebooks will increase the sales of everything once we get all this stuff (price, rights) figured out,” says Minotaur's Martin. “And crime fiction is a big category for ebooks. If you look at the best sellers lists for ebooks, they now mirror the print best sellers.”

From: Library Journal