you know what's completely absent from the sub-genre of

[james_davis_nicoll]

women who gave up careers in the big city to move to a small town, run a small business, find a new romance, adopt or foster a couple of kids and solve crime? Women who decide/discover at age 40 that yeah, they really do prefer to be romantically involved with women over men.

Why is that?

[They exist, I just don't get sent them for some reason. Time to go button hole my editors on this matter]

Comments

[eagle]

I am now completely conditioned to treat stuff you add in brackets as text added years later, which caused a certain amount of cognitive dissonance while parsing this entry.

Slightly off topic

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Am I right in believing (or did I dream it) that there are imprints of detective novels that are essentially sold only to libraries who want crime novels by the yard?

Re: Slightly off topic

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

If so, I am unaware of it. If libraries are buying them, though, it must reflect some demand from the patrons.

Re: Slightly off topic

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Can't remember where I got the impression. I will have to track down one of the books I am thinking of and investigate.

Re: Slightly off topic

[nicosian.livejournal.com]

That would explain a lot.:D

growing up, the main library in my hometown had an entire spinner rack of L R Hubbard. ( multiple copies of his work). I wondered how that had to happen. It wasn't a scientology heavy town. Maybe a crate of em got mis-shipped to that library, I'll never know.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

All mt local libraries had sets of his books as well. I suspect that so few people actually request specific books or authors that it is very easy for a couple of people asking for an author to influence the discretionary spending at a local branch.

Re: Slightly off topic

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Yes. Severn House and Five Star exist pretty much only for libraries' benefit. Five Star is owned by Gale/Cengage, a publisher of reference books.

There are also a couple of romance imprints that are similar.

Re: Slightly off topic

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Five Star publishes romances as well as mysteries (if you already knew this, please ignore).

Re: Slightly off topic

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I had forgotten! They also used to do Westerns, didn't they?

Re: Slightly off topic

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Back in the stone age when I was a librarian, they did. They became almost the only reliable source of new westerns by the time I left the library in 2008.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Constable in the UK was this in the 90s, but I think they are now defunct. (Pity, as one series they published I really liked, J Robert Janes's novels set in France during WWII, has only just restarted).

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I liked Janes books though they are a very dark.

Re: Slightly off topic

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

In the UK, Robert Hale, perhaps Collins Crime Club. I remember a lot of them in Ingol library in the 1980s.

[srogerscat.livejournal.com]

Because stories about forty year old lesbian protagonists are not as arousing to young straight men as tales of twenty year old lipstick lesbians?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Men are not the primary buyers of mysteries. Of any sort of books, really, aside a few small genres.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

As I recall the stats from about a decade ago:

 
Genre    % sales
Romance     50
Mystery     25
Fantasy      4
SF           2

[srogerscat.livejournal.com]

Point taken, but...
....are most editors twenty something males at heart?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Let me mentally check something....

Of the dozen or so editors I deal with, only three are men.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

No.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I've read a few but they are marketed strictly to lesbians. So you will probably only find them in bookstores like Glad Day.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Titles?

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Mary Wings wrote a few - "She Came By The Castro" is one, IIRC. For CanCon, there's the Harriet Hubley ones.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Several by Sandra Scoppettone.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Oh hell, that will require research. Let me see if I can drum up some distant memories of a few.

[badgerbag.livejournal.com]

I used to just sit in BookWoman and read these..... there were oodles of them. In the 80s.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Because you aren't looking for them from the lesbian book distributors? I'm not sure from your laundry list whether "solve crime" is an essential element or optional, but using that as a filtering mechanism you might try browsing through the mystery/suspense/intrigue category at Bella Books (which distributes for a wide variety of lesbian-focused/inclusive publishers as well as distributing their own publications. (Full disclosure: my own first novel is coming out from Bella in January.)

I confess that my own genre tastes don't run to contemporary mysteries so I can't come up with titles off the top of my head, but I find it extremely unlikely that there aren't at least a dozen professionally published books out there fitting your criteria -- and even more self-published, of course.

[michael a. davis (from livejournal.com)]

I would guess that historically (though less so contemporarily), said detective would be moving in the opposite direction.

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

Definitely less so these days. I know two different couples who moved from the city to, in one case, a suburb of Princeton, for one of them to go to grad school (and since they're in NJ, they can now marry legally!), and another couple in which one is a clergy person who was called to a suburban pulpit (a Congregational church). Both sound to me like pretty good settings for a cracking mystery! However, in both couples, all four women have known for a very long time that they're gay--none of them came to the realization late in life. I know another couple in their seventies who were both married to men when they were younger, and they have children and grandchildren, but they did the more usual country-to-city transition about twenty years ago. They're about 20-30 years older than the other women.

[ravenskyewalker.livejournal.com]

Back in the 1990s, I was aware of (and read) loads of lesbian detective novels. As a poster notes, Mary Wings was one, but there were others (but ask me to name them, and I probably no longer can, alas). I know at least one of the former lesbian-leaning book publishers has since gone out of business, but find it difficult to believe that there aren't enough self-published books to make up for some of that loss. (My life went chaotic enough back in 1999 that I lost track of certain things; regrettably, that was one.)

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

Here's a list of gay and lesbian detective series from Stop, You're Killing Me:
http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/DiversityCats/GayLesbian.html

I seem to recall a series about a lesbian who owned a fine restaurant and had a friend/sidekick named Cordelia, but I can't find anything that matches.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Probably the Jane Lawless series, by Ellen Hart: http://www.ellenhart.com/jane.html

[(Anonymous)]

Yes! Yes! Thank you.

I remembered the author as 'Carolyn Hart', but since none of her stuff matched, I thought I was losing what was left of my mind!

Heck, it's on that list I linked to at 'Stop, You're Killing Me', but somehow I missed it. Duhhhh.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Definitely the Jane Lawless books. I think a new one just came out, too!

[aberrantangels]

I was trying to remember the author of the Micky Knight series. Thanks!

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I am at a severe disadvantage, momentarily, due to recent eye surgery, but I have some answers for your question. I read a lot of lesbian books in the 80s that covered those situations.

J. M. Redman wrote the Mickey Knight series; Ellen Hart went from lesbian publisher to a mainstream house, and still publishes although I have lost track of her books. More once I'm upright for a greater percentage of time...