Urban Tragedy

 I don't know why this happens, but periodically it does happen, and it's happened again. The Facebook algorithm, my quirky computer pal, has taken to inundating me with Urban Fantasy and Cosy Crime sponsored adverts again. 

Cosy Crime I'm aware of, no one can have watched as much Murder, She Wrote/Marple as I have, and not have a clear understanding of the form. A village, cottages with roses round the door, a post office, butcher's, pub, friendly local bobby, sticky-beak spinster in the general store, a rosy-cheeked retired colonel, a smattering of clean-limbed young people with RP voices, some yokel types for local colour/saloon bar dressing and, of course, your sleuth, who will be an older woman with twinkly eyes who everyone in the book underestimates apart from one of the young people, who will come to recognise her steel-trap mind and unerring judgement. 

Obviously there's been a glut of these in the wake of Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club series, which has been a publishing phenomenon in the UK, and possibly elsewhere. Richard's a very clever man, and I don't doubt they're competently written with a satisfying central mystery. I've not read them. Richard's a TV format guy, that's what he loves. He would have taken the cosy form apart, worried at its constituent bits and carefully pieced it back together, having divined its secrets. In the same way I suspect J.K.Rowling did with her Harry Potter books, just with slightly different materiel, a modern mix of C.S. Lewis, Enid Blyton and the Greyfriars/ Mallory Towers stories. With Richard, it was the smart way to do it: follow the market, see what the next trend is likely to be, stitch together a hefty Frankenstein whodunnit, and count the coins. Actually, he probably gets someone else to count the coins. He's a details guy, but that's too many details. 

I'm assuming, like the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, everyone who picked up a copy of Thursday Murder Club decided, "I'll have a go at that" and immediately put together a Man's Shed of rough diamond pensioners who solve homicides around the Surrey Hills area. There are hundreds of these hopeful, self-published tomes with AI watercolour covers and hundreds of five star reviews on Amazon, saying banal things like, "Loved this book. Greatest characters ever. Can't wait for the next one." I tend to look at the one star reviews, as I suspect the bottiness of those blandly non-specific raves. I don't know how you generate 60 five star reviews that don't sound like they've ever cracked the spine of the book in question - I wish I did - but the one star reviews at least mention what they didn't like about the book. Usually, oddly, it's bad language. There are a surprising amount of people who are offended by effing and jeffing. Then again, there's not a lot of swears in Agatha Christie's oeuvre. She's much too classy. And a surprisingly accomplished surfer. 

That is my absolute favourite fact about Agatha Christie. She was an early adaptor of surfing. 

No diss, btw, I'm not singling out whatever book this is, if it is indeed from a book, I just put "Urban Fantasy" into Google Images and this is what it showed me. 

My particular peeve, though, is the Urban Fantasy books I see everyday. There is something so tragic about them. They give me the ick, the hot elbow. They're pathetic, mewling and needy, and there's the awful thought that I hate them so much because I see something of myself in them. I'll explain later. 

Urban Fantasy books are a subgenre of Fantasy proper, where the action has been transposed from Narnia to somewhere that is recognisably where you live. A coven of witches in Basingstoke. A troubled werewolf from Odiham. An immortal, time-traveling vampire with a snarky cat called Brian in, I dunno, Guildford. They seem to be influenced by TV and film as much as literature and they all look largely the same. They appear on bespoke sponsored Facebook pages called "Your-name-here: author" and the posts on the page are the author posting about the book, and giving you nothing about themselves. If you want that, there'll be a link to the Amazon page, where you can read their whimsical bio. The covers are always AI. They all look largely the same. The same tropes appear again and again: wizards 'n' witches, time-travel, immortality, vampires, ghosts, detectives with anthropomorphic pets, and they appear in epic series, batches of seven or ten books, featuring the same cool characters battling demons through time or whatever. A lot of them pitch the books with straplines like: "Want Buffy the Vampire Slayer but they all work in a paper supplies factory" "It's the Matrix with a sassy dragon!" "The Time Traveling Vampire Detective You Need!" They're just wish fulfilment, a fleet of Mary Sues, self-inserted authors suddenly mysterious, deadly and painfully attractive for the first time. 

Sigh. 

There's nothing WRONG with it, really. Its the way of the world. Lots of books, even good ones, are written for you to identify with or at least understand the lead character. It's just the weird checklists that accompany the books: "Murder and Mayhem, Newfound Magical Life, Slow Burn Romance, Unconventional Cat Familiar" look like a list of ingredients you can tick off. I like "Murder and Mayhem" but can I have it with "Time Travelling Fallen Angel" please, with a side-order of "doomed queer romance". Yes. Yes, you can. Give me ten minutes and I'll feed that prompt into ChatGPT, and that'll be six dollars or you can have the series of ten for twenty. 

I cannot see how anyone can write ten books they actually care about, that they consider art, that they've sculpted, and shaped and loved, in a year. David Walliams must be running a sweat shop. 

Why do you care, John? Let them have their silly stories about ghosts and time travel and first person narratives all set in a recognisable modern metropolitan centre. What's it got to do with you, you bully. 

My next book has ghosts in it. There is time travel. There are not one but three first person narratives. There is a paranormal event and, if you felt so inclined, you could say there's a magic potion in it too. It is set in a non-specific modern city. 

But. 

It took me a long time to write. There is art and love and care etched into every sculpted sentence. My characters are not enhanced versions of me. They are not enhanced versions of anybody. My characters are broken, damaged, lost and alone. They're actually worse than me, if you can imagine. Its witty, thoughtful and strange. There are no snarky cats or sassy dragons. There is a duck, but it says nothing and keeps its distance. There is no serving suggestion beyond, "If you enjoyed Fine, you will probably enjoy How Ghosts Affect Relationships. Because that's its name. 

I think it's very good. 

Not Urban Fantasy, though. 

Definitely not. 

No.