Playing for Pizza

As previously mentioned I’m a bit of a twitter stalker. I have recently hunted down a number of the authors who are visiting Harrogate on the site, mainly to look at if they have any books coming out but also to sneak at peak at what they might be having for tea (a favourite topic of discussion here in the office, stir fry for me in case you want to know)

I’ve often wandered if there is some kind of link between the genre of books people like and the genre of music they listen to. Both me and the Sister like rock music (bordering on heavy metal but I don’t like to admit that in case people get the wrong impression of me, I have no piercings and don’t own any faded t-shirts with skulls on them!) and as we’ve established we both have a borderline obsessive love of crime fiction.

My initial glance through the world of twitter did seem to confirm my suspicion, a fair few had put rock music in their likes (although even more seemed to rate a love of pizza as a top interesting fact about themselves – I like pizza is that another common link?) However the more I looked in depth the more I realised that actually there are seemingly no common factors other than a love of reading crime.

It would be interesting to do a survey to see if there is some common thread linking the types of people who like certain genres. It can’t be linked to genes as neither my Mum or Dad read them (in fact its debatable if my Dad has ever read anything except Farmers Weekly) and although my Gran is a big reader she’s more a ‘chick lit’ ‘fireside romance’ kind of women than a serial killer chaser.

Now don’t get me wrong I read other types of books too. I like the odd girly book myself as I think sometimes you need a break from death and destruction but the one genre I always come back to is ‘crime’. I’ve never actually counted up how many books I own but if I did I imagine the majority would be crime related, or at the very least mysteries. Then again most books have an element of mystery, whether its girl meets boys and which one she will fall for, or a fantasy novel good versus evil plot (never read any so can’t really comment)

I suppose it depends what you define as Crime as the genre is so incredibly broad it could pretty much cover everything. According to Wikipedia it’s all much more detailed than that. Crime novels are classifield as those told from the point of view of the perpetrator, whereas detective novels are those focussing on the solving of a crime, and mystery fiction are ‘whodunits’ where a vital piece of information is kept hidden until the climax. Interestingly one sub-genre is called ‘locked room mystery’ where things happen in a locked room. I did recently read ‘Locked in’ by Kerry Wilkinson although I’m not sure one book can be counted as a sub-genre.

Personally I’ll stick to the general term of crime for the novels I like, this is after all the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writers Festival Challenge, not the crime, mystery, and detective writers festival challenge. That’s way too much of a mouthful, I’m still waiting for TOPCWFC to start trending on twitter. Maybe if I keep the stalking up I’ll get there!