Here’s a confession: I don’t think about genre when I’m writing. Especially not during the planning, the research or the writing process. And mostly not after it’s finished, either.
Look, I am perfectly aware of the extended family tree of crime fiction’s secondary categories. And I know most of my Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido novels fall into the grouping of police procedurals, the subgenre pioneered by Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim (1945) and perfected by my late great hero Ed McBain. His 87th Precinct series, starting with Cop Hater (1956), established so many of the genre’s conventions: ensemble casts, multiple concurrent cases, and detailed attention to police methodology.
But mostly, I don’t think about it much.
It’s not because I don’t care: of course I do – a lot. I care about the story. I spend weeks and months trying to figure out how to make it engrossing, page-turning, suspenseful and entertaining. Once it’s published, I leave it up to publishers, reviewers and academia to figure out the technical stuff. I approach my reading similarly. If I think it’s going to be a mesmerizing book, I’ll read it. I don’t care about the literary classification.
That’s the way I’ve worked for thirty years. But every now and again, something happens that forces you to reconsider the whole genre thing.
A while ago, I had the honor of an invitation to discuss my latest novel Leo with the members of the Elsiesrivier Public Library. Elsiesrivier is the neighborhood where Vaughn Cupido, one of my fictional detective-protagonists, grew up, a disadvantaged community on the sprawling Cape Flats near Cape Town in South Africa.
Halfway into the session, the librarian leading the discussion asked me if I thought Leo fell in the subgenre of heist/caper fiction. The question took me by complete surprise. Not only because it was something I’d never considered. It wasn’t even a genre variant I have ever given much analytic thought to, to be honest.
So, I stumbled towards a vague answer, the upshot of which was that it probably was something like that, amongst other things… To my relief, she then moved on to other topics.
Like all great questions, it kept on nagging away at me. Should I, as a full-time professional crime fiction author, have had a more specific thoughtful answer at hand? Why have I never, at festivals and gatherings, had a dialogue with my crime fiction writing colleagues about this before. Do some of them (or all of them!) carefully consider the literary niche of their next novel? Do they study all the sub-branches of the genre’s bloodline, and the DNA of each one? Am I the only one who doesn’t?
Moreover, is Leo a heist novel? And if it is, did it conform, did it live up to the expectations? Did I get it right?
I went looking for answers in many places. Which eventually lead me to Claude, recommended to me by the legendary South African playwright, screenwriter and producer Deon Opperman, during a podcast on which I was a guest. Claude is a “next generation artificial intelligence assistant built by Anthropic and trained to be safe, accurate, and secure to help you do your best work”—according to itself (https://claude.ai).
And so, I had an extended chat – a first for me – with an AI sidekick reputed to be the go-to destination for creative souls.
Claude told me that heist/caper fiction focuses on the intricate planning and execution of complex crimes, usually thefts or cons:
“What makes this subgenre distinct is that readers often find themselves rooting for the criminals, who are typically portrayed as clever, charismatic, and operating by their own moral code.
The stories usually feature a mastermind assembling a team of specialists; detailed planning sequences; complex security systems or obstacles to overcome; unexpected complications or twists; often, elements of humor and wit; and themes of loyalty, betrayal, and honor among thieves.”
To my reckoning, Leo ticked all these boxes. And despite my deep distrust in AI and its practices, I was also pretty chuffed when Claude mentioned some of my favorite novels as prime examples of the subgenre: The Hot Rock (1970) by Donald E. Westlake, The Great Train Robbery (1995) by Michael Crichton and the brilliant The Score (1964) by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake’s darker pen name).
The problem was, only half of Leo was about a caper. Two heists, to be exact, but still, it was just one of the two main story lines. The other half was, to my reckoning, rather traditional police procedural – Benny and Vaughn investigating several murders committed in the postcard-pretty setting of Stellenbosch, a university town in the Cape Winelands.
I consulted Claude again. It said:
“The key characteristics of the procedural subgenre are: emphasis on realistic police work rather than dramatic amateur sleuthing, attention to forensic detail and investigative procedures, focus on the team rather than a single detective, integration of personal lives with professional duties, exploration of departmental politics and bureaucracy, and usually featuring multiple cases running simultaneously.”
Again, Leo passed muster on all of these.
I mentioned this complication of two subgenres on one book to Claude. The response?
“Ah, that’s fascinating – you’re working both sides of the crime! This puts Leo in an interesting space, following both the criminals’ elaborate planning and execution AND the police investigation. This dual perspective automatically makes it more complex than a pure heist story.
There are some precedents for this approach – think of The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, which splits its focus between the assassin’s meticulous planning and the detective’s methodical pursuit. Or Michael Mann’s film Heat, which gives equal weight to both the heist crew and the police investigation.”
All of which is, of course, hugely flattering. (And that is part of my general, hard-to-put-a-finger-on-it mistrust in and discomfort with Claude. It was just a little too eager to please, too hasty to stroke the ego, too ready with a compliment. As if flattery would convince me of its competence. And there was a sleazy slickness to it all, an eager beaver quickness of responses I found slightly disturbing. It would have been a lot more likeable and believable if it pretended to think long and hard. But that’s just me projecting, I suppose.)
Nevertheless, ‘an interesting space’ does not answer the librarian’s question, does it?
Which brings me back to my original Elsiesrivier answer. Would I now respond differently?
Not so much. I would still say (with more informed confidence) Leo probably is heist/caper fiction, amongst other things. But eventually, neither clever Claude nor the vast amount of information I gathered during the interaction, changed my basic philosophy: focus on the story. Make it captivating. And let other people worry about its place on the ever-extending genre family tree.
–Author photo by Brenda Veldtman
