September–October 2013 • 9 A piece of fiction is often said to “find its audience,” meaning that certain elements of the piece appeal to a particular set of readers that has some characteristic or set of characteristics in common. Sometimes the characteristics define a large audience that will sustain a regular production of books written and edited to appeal to this audience. These books share common elements that create guidelines for the genres and subgenres of commercial publishing . Many of the elements are general. “Cozy” mysteries are light on sex and violence, for example, without being too specific about what “light” means, but the readership knows it when it sees it. Some characteristics are very particular to a specific audience. Author Eve K. Sandstrom, who lives near Lawton, Oklahoma, has described how an editor demanded that Satanists in one of her novels not sacrifice a cat. Never mind the fact that Satanists often do such things, as her research proved. Readers who like “cozy” mysteries are generally cat fanciers. A novelist who murders the entire church choir is merely providing corpses, but one who murders a cat deserves an eternity of languishing unread on the ice of the ninth circle. Under the pseudonym Joanna Carl, Sandstrom has also written a successful “chocoholic mystery” series, initiated in 2006 by the title The Chocolate Cat Caper. The title not only panders to the appeal of cats to this audience but also evokes the old joke about a pandering publisher who creates the can’t-fail novel Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog. Some people like shredded wheat; others religiously masticate their bran cereal. Still others like their corn flakes and can’t get enough of sugar and corn. For all its artistic qualities and pretensions, fiction is entertainment for the audience , which has no practical need to read it unless trying to understand a particular culture or pick up a literature degree. Like motion picture companies, brewers, automobile manufacturers, and everyone else in So Who Has Time to Read? Social Class and Crime Writing, Part 1 Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis photo : ronald grant archive / mary evans 10 worldliteraturetoday.org the business of selling consumer products, publishers (if not authors themselves) directly target defined audiences catering to their likes and dislikes and exploiting their interests. One of the clichés of publishing is that women read fiction and men don’t; however, surveys confirm the anecdotal truism. In an NPR interview, Carla Cohen, owner of the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, said, “We see it every time in our store. Women head straight for the fiction section and men head for nonfiction.” Ian McEwan has said that without women, the novel would be extinct. The Harry Potter series is credited with having caused an uptick in boys reading, but many surveys show more women readers in every category of book except history and biography.* Even among the aging group of Western readers, there are more women than men. Naturally, then, publishers tend to seek novels that appeal to women in ways similar to the movie moguls who avoided scripts lacking female characters and romantic subplots. According to Hollywood legend, an executive once shouted out, “Where’s da goil?” at the end of an MGM prescreening , and a “goil” in love with the hero was spliced into the film. A novel manuscript perceived as having “goil” appeal is far more likely to get a contract. Some subgenres of the mystery (like the cozy) are pitched almost entirely to a female readership. But now even “tough guy” detective novels tend to have female sidekicks or other active female characters. Making the tough guy protagonist into a tough woman (in Sara Paretsky’s, Sue Grafton’s, and Marcia Muller’s novels, for example) has been said to have saved the hardboiled novel from its severe decline in the 1970s. Gender appeal is so commonly discussed as an aspect of different mystery genres’ marketability that it is almost taken for granted. Social class, however, is discussed much less often, although it is an obvious characteristic of the various subgenres of crime writing. Take the traditional, so-called “British” mystery. Who is more preoccupied with class issues than...