Note: this is in place of my WIP Wednesday post, which will reappear next week.

One of the questions that readers ask, whether consciously or not, is, “Why should I buy your book?” Most people have a finite amount of money to spend on books, so they want to know what makes an author’s works worth spending part of that capital on when there are hundreds, if not thousands, of titles to choose from just in their genre of choice. According to the website proactivewriter.com, in my genre, crime and mystery, 299 million units were sold last year out of a total of just a bit under 2.6 billion. So, that seems like a pretty good number until you realize, according to zippia.com, approximately four million new books were published in 2019. Granted, those new books aren’t all in my genre, but there aren’t that many, and since mine is a very popular genre, there are probably literally hundreds of thousands of new crime and mystery novels coming out on a yearly basis. That’s a lot of competition.

So why is Harry different from the thousands of other detectives you could read about? Here are a few ways. This is not an exhaustive list, but I think these are the most important.

• Harry has Dee. Granted, some of the detectives/cops who are the heroes, and often narrators, of the books in my field are in relationships. But one of the things that makes Harry and Dee different is they’re in a committed, life-long relationship. They are partners through good and bad. They understand love is a choice and not just a feeling, so they choose to love each other every day. They’re married and both take marriage seriously enough to know their relationship is more important–more important than any other relationship and more important than the job. So, these stories are, at least in part, about the two of them working together to find a healthy balance between their marriage and his work, which can consume too much time and mental energy if it’s allowed to. Things aren’t always smooth, but they’re on the path together.
• Harry has a strong moral compass. Again, this is similar to many of his peers. My de facto mentor, Robert B. Parker and his progenitor, Raymond Chandler, essentially patented this idea of the knight born out of time. But unlike Parker’s Spenser and Chandler’s Marlowe, Harry’s compass, while internalized, is based on something larger than him. Spenser believes in doing what he says, helping the underdog, and standing up for the defenseless, but his code pretty much ends there. He isn’t married to his live-in love, Susan Silverman, on whom he has cheated on more than one occasion because, in his mind, it’s just sex. He has committed violent crimes without qualms in order to help his clients. I could go on, but these issues point to another difference between Harry and many other crime drama heroes.
• Harry has a more positive world view. That’s not to say he believes in the goodness of people. Just the opposite. He understands that humanity is dark and depraved. But unlike Spenser and Marlowe and many other heroes, he believes that good will ultimately win. He’s not a nihilist who sees his efforts as ultimately futile. Instead, he believes in an ultimate good that is at work in the world and that will win in the end. And that ultimate good is the last thing that makes Harry different.
• Harry is a person of faith. Harry’s Christian faith is not simply a set of rules he tries to follow. He has a personal and abiding relationship with God, and that relationship causes him to try to live his whole life in grateful response to God’s sacrificial love and to live in a sacrificially loving way in all his relationships. That’s not usual in the field of crime drama. Most have a moral compass, but one of their own creation, which makes it ultimately flawed and more easily broken. And they are also much more cynical about the world and their role in it.

So that’s what makes Harry different from some other crime drama heroes. For some of you, that may draw you to him. For others, it may be a turn-off. But either way, you know where he stands. I’d love to hear your reactions to this, so please leave your comments. I promise I’ll respond!

Smailes, G. (2020, August 13). Which book genre is the most popular in 2021? Which book genre is the most popular? Retrieved May 9, 2022, from https://proactivewriter.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-genre-for-your-book-what-is-the-most-popular-best-selling-book-genre

Kolmar, C. (2022, January 4). 23 gripping book industry statistics [2022]: Facts about the US book industry. Zippia. Retrieved May 9, 2022, from https://www.zippia.com/advice/us-book-industry-statistics/