THE CAREER NOVELIST
Fortunately for cash-strapped authors, mysteries do offer one no-
cost way of attracting attention: their titles. There are three basic
approaches: cute/comical (e.g., William DeAndrea's TV-industry
mystery Killed in the Ratings); series-connecting (e.g., Sue Grafton's A
is for Alibi); and finally, those that intrigue simply because they are
mysterious. Some examples:
- The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly
- Bootlegger's Daughter by Margaret Maron
- The Face of a Stranger by Anne Perry
- The Curious Eat Themselves by John Straley
Whatever one's approach to building a mystery career, authors in
this field can be sure of one thing: the mystery category is one of
publishing's everlasting and most dynamic sectors. It may be differ-
ent in ten years, or even in ten months, but it will still be around
and going strong.
SUSPENSE: GOODBYE SPIES, HELLO AMERICA
Who would have thought that we would miss the Cold War? That,
strangely, is the situation in the world of suspense novels. Since the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist govern-
ment in the former Soviet Union, the public no longer feels threat-
ened by traditional evildoers.
The search is on for new categories of global-scale villains, but
the hunt is not going terribly well. Persian Gulf dictatorships, South
American drug cartels, Japanese business cabals, computer crimi-
nals, atomic terrorists, environmental blackmailers ... all these
have been auditioned in recent thrillers, but none of them have
caught on as a durable new source of conspiracy. Perhaps readers
do not feel personally threatened by them.
So, is it Nazis to the rescue? These reliable suspense villains can
still be revived, although as World War II recedes into the past it
grows increasingly difficult to turn them into a credible present-day
threat. Even a recent best-seller by Allan R. Folsom, The Day After
Tomorrow, could not make neo-Nazis seem dangerous. Only by bring-
ing Hitler's frozen head into the picture (supposedly to be attached