Whose names appear?
What demographic dominates the “legal thriller” category?
White men.
There’s nothing wrong with white men per se. I’m married to one. He’s wonderful. He’s an engineer, not a lawyer. His career choice has nothing to do with his wonderful-ness; it’s just a fact.
There were a few white women. Lisa Scottoline. Jodi Piccoult. A few others.
But minorities? I went through list after list, page after page, trying to find anyone who was a minority writing in this category. Frustrating. After an hour of searching, I found Attica Locke (author of Pleasantville and Black Water Rising) and Pamela Samuels Young (author of Lawful Deception). I had never heard of these authors. Both are on my Goodreads to-read shelf, and I have a review for Black Water Rising scheduled soon.
What did this mean, I wondered. Were there fewer African-Americans writing and publishing legal thrillers? If so, why? And why was it so difficult to find those “other” authors, the non-bestselling or newer authors of any race or ethnicity? Systematic racism in publishing? Google algorithms at work? I didn’t know. I still don’t.
Soon after, I found a more effective way of searching: Twitter.
As a new member, I followed a few minority and female writers in my genre. Then Twitter recommended similar writers. So I followed those writers. Then more recommendations, some from Twitter and some from other people I follow.
(I followed based on more than their race or gender, of course. I looked for all writers in my genre and followed interesting people.)
What do writers do? (Besides write.) They talk about writing.
And their books. And other people’s books. And other writer’s tweets, which the ever-so-helpful Twitter lets me see. That’s bad for privacy, but great for hearing the buzz about new authors.
Now I have a list of authors to find and a long to-read list of books that I never would have found through Amazon or Goodreads.
But here’s my point:
To find novels by anyone other than Caucasians, my search had to be intentional.
I had to intentionally search for legal thrillers by anyone besides the usual suspects.
That’s troubling.
I ran across an old Washington Post op-ed by Jeff Bezos, who wrote about reading only minority authors for a year. He wrote that it was incredibly difficult to find authors and titles, and even more difficult to lay hands on either the Kindle version or a hard copy.
How many people are intentional in their reading choices?
As humans, we gravitate toward ease. We reach for the books by familiar authors, often the ones with huge displays in the bookstore or the ones at the top of the Amazon bestseller list. Even if we know the book will be a rehash of the last 20 books that author wrote, we’ll still read it. Why? Because familiar is comfortable.
But should reading make us comfortable?
It’s troubling in a genre like the legal thriller. (It’s troubling in all genres, but I’ll focus on this one.)
If the dominant writers are mainly white males, then their novels will reflect that view of the American legal system.
It’s the privileged view of a white male. Their experiences with the system are different from the experiences of those who are neither white nor male. They have blind spots.
Grisham, Baldacci, and the other bestsellers may be terrific guys. I don’t know them. This isn’t a strike against them as people or writers. For all I know they could read a wide range of authors, too, and do their best to reflect that in their writing. But they’d still have blind spots.
Everyone has blind spots.
I know I do. Even when we try to overcome them–something that, again, we have to do intentionally–there are still places we can’t see.
That’s one reason I try to read books from a variety of people. Not exclusively women or men, Caucasian or Asian or African-American or others, American or elsewhere. It helps to an extent, I think. It’s unwise to eliminate an entire demographic based on gender, race or ethnicity, or sexuality.
But I know people whose view of the legal system is shaped by popular culture, namely television and legal thrillers. They reach for the comfortable, familiar authors. Because of this, those bestselling authors have the power to shape their readers’ ideas on some important issues.
But what if readers were introduced to different views of the American legal system? How would this change them? Would it? How can that happen if it’s difficult to find the other viewpoints?
I don’t have an answer. There’s a difference between knowing that a change should happen and knowing how that change can happen.
I’m grateful that I’ve discovered new writers on Twitter, though, and look forward to reading more book recommendations. At least it’s a place to start going in the right direction.
What about you? Are you intentional in your reading choices? Have you looked for authors who are different from you? Was it difficult?