The Gender Divide, Part I: Why I Don’t Like Elmore Leonard

Yesterday I linked to a survey that showed that 50% of boys in the UK don’t read at all. Reading habits are interesting me of late on a number of levels, especially as applied to crime fiction. As often spouted, the majority of people reading within the genre are women, but looking more closely at the claim, things get a little more specific—many men don’t read books written by women, some do the opposite, and that’s not even getting into the subgenres, figuring out who reads hardboiled more than cozy, thrillers more than straight mysteries, or whatnot.

I am, as should be obvious, a young woman, and that makes me a bit of an odd duck amongst crime fiction readers. Because I don’t have a lot of peers who read as extensively and as thoroughly as I do, and so I’m more likely than not the youngest in a given group, whether it be fans, writers, booksellers, publishing types, or any other group I’ve neglected to list. I also don’t read many cozies, and in fact, tend to shy away from them. So that means I’m not reading the kind of books that are often written by women and geared towards women. Instead, I subscribe to the belief that the more noir something is, the better.

But even that’s not a hard and fast rule.

I subtitled this portion “Why I Don’t Like Elmore Leonard” because it’s mostly true, but also because there’s a specific reason for my opinion. In theory, I should be a fan of his—his books are dialogue-heavy, which I like; his stories move fast, another thing I really like, and his characters are full of interesting quirks and are often unapologetic about their moral ambiguity—again, something I dig. So why don’t I respond to Dutch’s books? It could be that I’ve tried the wrong ones (I’ve read RUM PUNCH, some of FREAKY DEAKY and less of MAXIMUM BOB along with a few of the stories in WHEN THE WOMEN CAME OUT TO DANCE) but the answer came to me as I watched an episode of the late, lamented “Karen Sisco,” (which is, of course, based on several of Leonard’s novels, including OUT OF SIGHT). As played by Carla Gugino, Sisco comes across as reasonably sympathetic, a gun-slinging Federal Marshal who loves her daddy and still acts like a woman, not a guy in a skirt. She has flaws, and Gugino injected her with a good mixture of humor and cynicism that, at least, worked for me. But as written by Leonard, the subtlety of Sisco is lacking, and I know less about her than when I started. Somehow, she—and many of Leonard’s characters—come across as less human. That somehow, Leonard is so into giving his characters cool things to say and weird tics that he forgets that the parts have to add up to an appreciable sum. That the reader has to be engaged in some form or another.

A couple of years ago, I walked into Murder Ink and bought a copy of George Higgins’ THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE. Seemed interesting, a lauded crime novel, suitably dark for my tastes, loved by many a writer—including Elmore Leonard. That should have been my tip-off. After about 70 pages I realized I didn’t much care to stick with the book and I put it down, and haven’t picked it up since. Yes, Higgins can write, and the dialogue is great—but so what? Again, something was missing for me, the same kind of something that’s missing in Leonard’s books. Am I seeing some nihilistic view of the world that I don’t like? Is it just a case of not caring about the characters and the conflict? I really don’t know. But anecdotally (for that’s all the evidence I have) a whole lot more men count themselves as fans of the above two authors than do women. So is it a gender thing?

Maybe, maybe not. Another writer who is often assumed to have few female fans is George Pelecanos. He’s definitely hit and miss amongst the female mystery fans I know; those that love him (like myself), love him; those that don’t are put off by the urban DC setting, the characters who populate the books, and the overall feel. He’s definitely not one to recommend to everyone, but he’s one of my favorite writers. Why? Because in his best books, amidst the despair and violence, there’s a smidgen of hope that comes through. Take THE SWEET FOREVER, which is set in the mid-1980s. It’s a tale of crooked cops, drug hits gone horribly wrong and has a pile of moral ambiguity (Karras and Clay are unbelievably flawed characters) but even as crack invades the DC ghettos, people are still cheering on their hometown boy Len Bias, just about to embark on seeming stardom with the Celtics. Bias didn’t have his happy ending, but in spite of that, there’s still the sense that eventually, Karras, Clay and the other major players in the book will climb out of their holes and burrow their way to a better future. This theme of hope and redemption in the face of bad tidings runs throughout the DC Quartet (and also in HARD REVOLUTION), but less so in the Strange/Quinn novels—which may explain why I don’t like them quite as much.

Maybe it all boils down to emotional response. I find that this is the common thread in the noir-esque novels I seek out. That within these works, there’s rage, despair, bleakness, but also hope, aspiration and betterment. That’s why I champion the writers that I do; that’s why folks like Ken Bruen, Martyn Waites, David Peace, Dennis Lehane and many others (and yes, I’m sticking to male writers for the time being) get so much ink here. Because their writing, their subject matter, their characters make me care. They may take me to places I don’t want to go or revisit, but they evoke a response that’s palpable and sometimes visceral. In other words, there’s honesty to their writing which I find lacking in those like Leonard or Higgins or Jim Thompson, another writer whose work somehow eludes me. For whatever reason, even though I recognize they write well and have devoted followings, their work doesn’t speak to me, whether as a reader or as a woman reader.

Part II will roll around this time tomorrow, but for now, a few questions for the floor: first, are there certain crime writers who really appeal to one gender more than another, as I’m arguing? If so, which others could be classified in that sense? And if not, why am I wrong?