Crime Fiction Dossier

If you'll allow me a brief ego stroke

Here's an ad for Lee Child's latest book that ran this morning in the New York Times:

If you click on the image, you can read the fine print at the bottom, where they include blurbs from Janet Maslin and myself. Publishers use blurbs all the time, of course, but it's nice when they include the critics' names with the quotes.

We deserve a little recognition for our words, don't we?

Do statistics matter?

In my comments to yesterday's post, I made reference to the statistics collected by Sisters in Crime. That organization, dedicated to raising the awareness of female authors in the mystery field, conducts what they call the "Review Monitoring Project."

They collect data on dozens of publications, breaking down how many books by men are reviewed, versus how many books by women. (They aren't explicit about whether or not they only count books from the crime genre, but I suspect that they include everything.) Their mission is "to make sure women are reviewed as often as men."

Here are the stats for the two publications I review most frequently for:

Publication                   Percentage Male       Percentage Female
Chicago Sun-Times         64.46                      35.54
Philadelphia Inquirer       59.49                      40.51

The average for all the publications they track is: 56.23% male, 43.77% female.

My personal stats for 2006 were: 61% male, 39% female.
My stats for 2005 were: 55% male, 45% female.

I always make a conscious effort to review as many books by women as I can -- not because of statistics like this, but because I try to provide the best service possible to my readers, and reviewing books by only one sex or the other wouldn't do that.

Something about the whole project makes me uneasy, though. I recognize the importance of overcoming biases whenever possible. If those biases exist regarding review coverage, we need to identify them and figure out ways to overcome them.

But is it important that we have a rigid breakdown where half of all books reviewed are written by men and half by women? (Several of the publications they track have a precise 50-50 split between the sexes, which hardly seems like it could be accidental.)

Should the books themselves be the determining factor, or is the sex of the author a valid criteria for deciding what gets reviewed?

Since I do consider the author's sex when deciding what the write about, I suppose that's my answer. But I'm not sure it's the appropriate one.

Publishers Marketplace's Top Reviewers

Publishers Marketplace has launched a new feature listing the "Top Reviewers" -- those reviewers with 25 or more reviews in their database. They note that they began tracking reviews in October 2002, and they include primarily full-length reviews in major newspapers that post their reviews to the Web.

You have to be a subscriber to see the listings, so I'll share some stats with you here:

David J. Montgomery
28 reviews : 23 positive (82%), 4 neutral (14%), 1 negative (4%)
Philadelphia Inquirer (17); Chicago Sun-Times (5); Boston Globe (4); South Florida Sun-Sentinel (1); Washington Post (1)

(Since they only include full-length reviews, much of my work, which comes in column round-ups, is not included. They also seem to be missing a few that I thought of.)

Here are the stats from some other prominent crime fiction reviewers:

Janet Maslin
382 reviews : 189 positive (49%), 159 neutral (42%), 34 negative (9%)
New York Times (378); Boston Globe (3); Los Angeles Times (1)

Oline H. Cogdill
246 reviews : 189 positive (77%), 28 neutral (11%), 29 negative (12%)
South Florida Sun-Sentinel (246)

Patrick Anderson
191 reviews : 107 positive (56%), 58 neutral (30%), 26 negative (14%)
Washington Post (190); New York Times (1)

Carol Memmott
62 reviews : 50 positive (81%), 8 neutral (13%), 4 negative (6%)
USA Today (62)

Adam Woog
48 reviews : 40 positive (83%), 8 neutral (17%), 0 negative (0%)
Seattle Times (48)

Tom Nolan
44 reviews : 35 positive (80%), 9 neutral (20%), 0 negative (0%)
San Francisco Chronicle (16); Los Angeles Times (16); Wall Street Journal (10); Boston Herald (2)

Betsy Willeford
33 reviews : 11 positive (33%), 22 neutral (67%), 0 negative (0%)
Miami Herald (31); South Florida Sun-Sentinel (1); Houston Chronicle (1)

Paula L. Woods
29 reviews : 23 positive (79%), 3 neutral (10%), 3 negative (10%)
Los Angeles Times (28); Washington Post (1)

I'm pretty high up there on the positive/negative ratio, which is not surprising, since I tend to select books for full-length reviews that I have something good to say about. If the data were included from my round-up pieces, I imagine that percentage would drop.

Even so, I wonder if I write too many positive reviews and not enough negative ones.

Latest Chicago Sun-Times column

My latest column ran this morning in the Chicago Sun-Times. It contains reviews of the following books:

Harlan Coben: The Woods
Lee Child: Bad Luck and Trouble
John Sandford: Invisible Prey
David Ignatius: Body of Lies
David Baldacci: Simple Genius

I liked the first four, didn't like the last one.

Review of John Sandford's "Invisible Prey"

My latest review ran this morning in the Washington Post: John Sandford's Invisible Prey.

The seventeenth book in the series and still going strong!

Article on the decline of book coverage

Cheryl Reed, my editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, has an excellent article in the paper today about the decline in book coverage. I don't have much hope that all the attention this subject has been getting recently will make much difference. However, at least one newspaper executive still gets it.

Reed writes:

Concerned about the security of the book pages here, I asked Sun-Times Publisher John Cruickshank, a bibliophile and frequent reviewer in these pages, whether there were plans to cut books coverage here. His response: "The Opinion and Books sections of the paper have never attracted much advertising, but they are at the core of any paper's identity and the engagement a paper has with its community. We are committed to these sections because they are integral to the basic character of the Chicago Sun-Times."

2007 Gumshoe Award Winners Announced

The 6th Annual Gumshoe Awards are given by Mystery Ink to recognize the best achievements in crime fiction. This year's nominees were chosen from books first published in the United States in 2006.

Best Mystery:

Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

The Nominees:

Ace Atkins - White Shadow
Ariana Franklin - City of Shadows
George Pelecanos - The Night Gardener
Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Station

Best Thriller:

Robert Ferrigno - Prayers for the Assassin

The Nominees:

Lee Child - The Hard Way
Barry Eisler - The Last Assassin
William Lashner - Marked Man
M.J. Rose - The Venus Fix

Best European Crime Novel:

Karin Fossum - When the Devil Holds the Candle

The Nominees:

Ken Bruen - The Dramatist
Gianrico Carofiglio - A Walk in the Dark
Philippe Claudel - By a Slow River
Barbara Vine - The Minotaur

Best First Novel:

John Hart - The King of Lies

The Nominees:

Dave Case - Out of Cabrini
James Church - A Corpse in the Koryo
Thomas Lakeman - The Shadow Catchers
Cornelia Read - A Field of Darkness

Lifetime Achievement:

Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker revolutionized the modern detective novel, helping to bridge the gap between the classic Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald tradition and the contemporary stories of Block, Grafton and Lehane. His creation of Spenser, the quintessential private eye, will live on long after his contemporaries have faded into obscurity. (Read the tribute essay to Robert B. Parker.)

Best Crime Fiction Website:

Demolition Magazine
http://www.demolitionmag.com

Edited by Bryon Quertermous and David White, Demolition Magazine is one of the best of the new wave of web-only magazines dedicated to publishing short crime fiction. With stories by such talented writers as Victor Gischler, Mike Maclean, Patricia Abbott and more, Demolition has quickly distinguished itself as a fresh new voice in crime fiction, and a publication worth noticing.