Publishing Pressures

Lilian Jackson Braun was one of my favorite authors with her huge collection of light-hearted mysteries, most involving YumYum and Coco, mystery-solving Siamese cats. She published three best-selling novels, but then dropped from the scene in the 80’s. A New York Times article said, “ Discouraged by the market’s seemingly insatiable demand for sex and violence in mystery novels — her books have little of either — she set the series aside for 18 years. After retiring from The Free Press, she resumed with “The Cat Who Saw Red,” which appeared in 1986.”  

She went on to publish scores of her best-sellers the way she liked to write them.  Bravo!!  I can recommend her books to everyone I know.

At least three other of my favorite mystery authors have over the years become harder and harder for me to read comfortably because they have chosen to survive by introducing more sex and violence into their stories. In July I wrote about the corruption of our language, a problem which is also huge in many novels today. It seems the authors have forgotten how to use real adjectives, verbs, and adverbs in their writing, and just replace them with myriad forms of the f… word. The solutions open to me are 1) skip every third word (oops! Too late, already read the word), 2) choose new authors and hope for the best, or 3) watch more T.V….you’ve got to be kidding!!