Crime is 'now the world's most popular genre'

‘Some readers love to stay local, and there's nothing wrong with that. But for me, the real beauty of fiction is that you can travel to anywhere in the world, you can travel to different periods in history, and you can be immersed in these amazing environments, all from the safety of your armchair. Publishers have finally cottoned on to the fact that readers are very intelligent consumers - you can present them with different types of crime fiction, instead of second-guessing that they only want to read more of the same. There's a whole range of people who have written different types of crime fiction that the industry didn't realise there was a market for, but publishers have now realised that readers are buying these books, and there's profit to be made. It all boils down to: is there a business case for this? And readers have demonstrated that there is...

The statistics show us that it's now the world's most popular genre, and not just in print, but if you turn on the TV or streaming services, it's crime shows that seem to be the most popular. Although crime fiction was always popular, it's reached new heights in the last few years.
It is very democratised around the world. Before it was purely a Western thing, but now if you turn on Netflix India there's a whole range of crime shows that were previously unheard of in India - it was all Bollywood and soap operas, but now crime thrillers are doing really well in these kinds of countries. Korea is another big market for crime fiction. It has become a global enterprise.'

Vaseem Khan, Crime Writers Association chair and author of the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series and the Malabar House books in Bookbrunch