My Genre and Rating, Gentle Reader

I find that I need to define the genre of my series more precisely. The reader needs to know what he or she is getting when picking up a copy of one of my twelve novels. Sure. Everyone knows what a Mystery is, and they also know what a Suspense novel is. The problem comes with rating.

Face it. Contemporary crime fiction, and that's what mysteries are, is filled with unsavory characters who commit various acts of mayhem. I'll not use names, but some authors habitually take what I consider the cheap way of grabbing the reader's attention by overt eroticism, extreme profanity, and graphic (to the point of nausea) violence. The problem for an author is how to immerse the reader in the story without using these three tricks when such things are indeed encountered in real life.

My solution is to avail myself of the greatest gift a writer can obtain, the reader's imagination. I try to let the reader imagine the whole scene in as much graphic detail (or not) as he or she wishes.

So back to the rating I was on about earlier. Although it is self-reporting, I provide on this e-business card a
"Graphic Meter." Call this "truth in advertising."