By Elizabeth Cali
I am working to get more granular in understanding the shifts in publication numbers of specific genres of novels in the 21st century. For this search, I began with searching for the number of novels categorized (even partially) as crime/detective/mystery novels in the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s. I wondered if there has been a particularly popular decade for publications in this area.
I thought perhaps we might see a spike in publications given the rise in interest in crime (albeit of the true variety) podcasts and television shows. The publication numbers of crime/detective/mystery novels are fairly consistent across the first three decades of the 21st century.
From our dataset, the number of novels published in the crime/mystery/detective category hover around 50 in the 2000s and in the 2010s, 49 and 52, respectively. To date they sit at 41 in the 2020s. The data suggest a consistency to both industry and creative commitment to these genres in contemporary Black publications that prompts an early insight and a question.
The insight: these numbers suggest this area of genre fiction is somewhat settled and stable in terms of their presence in contemporary Black literary output in the 21st century. The question: How settled are the author contributors to this area of genre fiction in terms of established authors versus newcomers to the scene each decade?
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