See You in Court (3). The American Genre Explosion from the Late 1980s: The Men

Abstract

Both the American legal trade and the narrative fiction of the legal thriller based on it are male dominated, as figures from the American Bar Association and counts and calculations from Terry White’s compilation respectively demonstrate. As far as the reading audience is concerned, one source of statistics shows that 47 per cent of all books read by survey respondents in July 2015 were ‘mystery, thriller, and crime’ (Statista: The Statistics Portal). Another source concludes that 68 per cent of mystery readers are female (Sisters in Crime (SinC) and PubTrack Consumer 2010: 10). However, before anything is read into such statistics, a generic breakdown should be critically scrutinized. In the SinC survey, a distinction is made between ‘espionage’, ‘mystery’, ‘fiction’ and ‘romance’ (2010: 7ff.), a breakdown which places the legal thriller in the mystery category. The inclusion of authors like John Grisham and Michael Connelly confirm the fact that legal thrillers are part of the mystery section, but the full list ranges very broadly indeed, from Agatha Christie to James Patterson to Dean Koontz (2010: 32). The internet site LitRejections breaks down narrative spectrum generically into ‘crime’, ‘thriller’, ‘mystery’ and ‘suspense’, with the legal thriller not in the mystery category, but as part of the thriller genre generally (LitRejections 2016).