New Dark Passages Column: on ‘Blanc Fiction’
At the LA Times, I use my unabashed love for Iain Sansom’s Mobile Library novels (THE CASE OF THE MISSING BOOKS is genius and the new one, THE BOOK STOPS HERE, is just as good) as a means of talking about crime novels that are light on gore and violence:
In the August issue of Paste magazine, Peter Langness praised what he
termed “blanc fiction” — crime novels with a lighter tone that
concentrate their narrative efforts on mining the human condition.
Though his primary example of Colin Cotterill’s “The Curse of the Pogo Stick”
(Soho Press: 272 pp., $24) doesn’t quite fit (some of the crimes, even
offstage, border on the bizarre and bloodthirsty), Langness scores more
accurate points praising “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” novels of
Alexander McCall Smith: Crimes of any kind (let alone murder) hardly
figure in the internationally bestselling series, eight books and
counting. “We are not here to solve crimes,” Precious Ramotswe, the
Botswanan “lady detective” in question, indignantly tells a potential
client. “We help people with the problems in their lives.”
The term “blanc fiction,” then, implies a sense of community between
the reader and the books’ characters. It might even be a better term
for what’s now called “cozy” mysteries, in which a crime’s commission,
detection and resolution recede into the background in favor of the
protagonist’s idiosyncrasies, whether on a personality, professional or
social level. Or, shrugging off complex reasoning, these books aim to
make the reader smile, to sip metaphorical bush tea for a few hours and
forget troubles in order to get happy — even on a temporary basis…