Breaking and Entering: How Deon Meyer’s New Novel Snuck Past Genre Boundaries ‹ CrimeReads

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.