The millennial is a strange beast. Though “millennial” is factually the word to describe someone born between 1981 and 1996, hearing it conjures a number of confusing associations: we’re soap killers, selfish and entitled, we can’t afford diamonds yet we hoover up avocados as if they contain the cure for austerity-driven ennui. And yet we are now old. Millennials are entering their 40s and are officially embarrassing to the generations below us. We are, in a sense, an abstract painting; what you think of millennials as a generation depends a lot on what you’re bringing to the table. We’re largely disaffected, our lives straddling huge socio-political, economic and technological changes, and potentially rudderless, yet old enough to get in serious trouble. As a result we laugh at tragedy quite a lot. So millennials make pretty fun protagonists.
I am, of course, biased. The protagonist of my book Grave Expectations is a millennial (who does not particularly like avocados) named Claire, working as a freelance medium. Claire is haunted, literally and figuratively, by her best friend, Sophie, who was murdered when they were both 17. I wanted to put a bit of a weird twist on the genre, but Sophie’s existence is also a handy literalisation of Claire’s feeling of arrested development and wasted potential. Sophie is also a class-A pain in the bum, and because nobody else can hear her she is free to vocalise any and all insults that come to mind.
You can see something similar (although far more wholesome) in Rebecca Ryan’s romantic comedy My (extra)Ordinary Life, in which Emily Turner discovers that she is the statistically average woman, from her hair to her blood group. That this discovery coincides with the 20th anniversary of her twin sister’s death does not help; Emily sets out to change almost everything about her life, whether she’ll enjoy being vegan and eating suspect paella in Spain or not. It’s both extremely funny and desperately relatable, and much of Emily’s angst about her ordinariness is linked to her feeling that her sister wouldn’t have lived an exciting life.
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, became a hit through word of mouth on TikTok, and follows a young woman suffering such extreme anhedonia, depression, and feels such lack of control of her life, that she spends a year sleeping it away. Meg Mason’s Sorrow And Bliss is an unforgettable story of a woman dealing with her dysfunctional yet bohemian family and failing marriage, at the same time as she reckons with an unspecified and largely undiagnosed mental illness that has affected her life since she was a teenager. These are not delightful romps, of course, but there’s a sense of being unmoored and needing help finding a mooring post that feels inherent to being millennial—and they are still funny! I think often of the Mason’s description of a millefeuille of grease and aluminium foil in the oven, and laugh out loud.
I should point out that I’m not being very original here, because Olivia Sudjic wrote about the millennial novel as far back as 2019. But to be more specific, it’s millennials who are, I think, driving a quiet revolution in crime novels. Katharine Ryan Howard, an author with many smash hits on her hands, wrote one of my favourite thrillers of recent years with Run Time, a true thriller no doubt, but a darkly funny one about a failed actress jumping at a chance to be in a low-budget horror movie, only to arrive on set and have the script start happening to her.
My own wheelhouse is where it’s really at, though. Writers like Jennifer J. Chow and Mia P. Manansala are changing the face of cosy crime, an always-popular genre that has exploded in popularity in the U.K. with the huge popularity of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series. But Osman’s gang of elderly sleuths, charming as they may be, are still broadly in the wheelhouse of what people expect of cosy crime: older citizen detectives with a twinkly gentility, belying a steely core (this is not to denigrate Agatha Christie and Miss Marple, who are of course goated—and I shall not take up vast swathes of this article ranting about how a genre that authors have been quietly working at for years, many of them woman, has only received mainstream legitimacy because a famous man off the TV decided to enter it).
Another author said to me recently that he thinks there’s too much swearing for my book to be cosy crime. He’s in the generational bracket above me, though, and I think there’s a dark streak to millennial humour that renders swearing and failure and even a brand of very online nihilism quite comforting to Millennials. Think about the different response you’d get if you posted that you were going to ‘walk into the sea’ on Twitter (or X now, I suppose) vs. posting it on Facebook. I enjoy most every type of cosy crime I’ve read, but a lot of them ignore how the definition of ‘cosy’ has changed for a great number of people.
Food, for example, has been a mainstay theme of cosy crime (think of Agatha Rasin and her Quiche Of Death) because making a nice apple pie and sharing it with your neighbor feels cosy. For Chow and Manansala’s protagonists, in Death By Bubble Tea and Arsenic And Adobo respectively, their relationship to food is inextricably linked to diaspora and family, and familial expectation, in different ways. Both books are specific and well observed, and both have a wry sense of humor derived from the frustration of those relationships, stacked next to tragedy. You see similar dark humor in Dial A For Aunties by Jesse Sutano, where Meddy Chan accidentally kills her blind date and asks her aunties to help her get away with murder.
This leads to the supplemental point that, where many crime protagonists have respect for the police (or indeed are the police), the millennial protagonist’s relationship with official law enforcement may be oppositional or suspicious, which is often part of what makes them a citizen detective in the first place—sometimes linked to our generation’s love affair, ethical or not, with true crime. Of course, in something like How To Kill Men And Get Away With It the antagonism is fairly obvious… In Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone this opposition is formalised by author Benjamin Stevenson, as Ernest’s father killed a policeman during a robbery, and his brother is in prison for a hit and run murder. Despite this bleak family history, the book itself is self-referential and meta about mysteries in general, and is extremely funny even as the bodies start to pile, if not high, then at least in a stack of middling height. As tall as the average seven-year-old, say.
Ernest definitely feels like the odd one out in his family, and many millennial protagonists build a found family around them instead—as is eventually the case with Claire in Grave Expectations. A distillation of the weirdo millennial protagonist may perhaps be found in Alice Slater’s Death Of A Bookseller, a debut described as both ‘pitch black’ and ‘sassy’, and featuring a true crime obsessive who has no real friends but does have a pet snail. If there’s one thing all millennial protagonists have in common it’s that they’re sort of screw ups whose lives have got away from them in some way—whether they’ve been dumped, lost their job, or they’re haunted by a teenager—but are so outwardly immured to their failures that they can still see the funny side of things. Including murder. And I think laughing in the face of tragedy is quite helpful in the year of our Lord 2023.
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