From Ian Fleming to Elmore Leonard, Jack Batten at the
Totonto Star defines the crime novel sub-genres.
Every year, in every form and venue — in bookstores, in Amazon warehouses, on ebooks — thousands of new books listed in the “crime fiction” category come to the market. Authors well known in the genre compete for sales — Lee Child, P.D. James and Kathy Reichs, for example — among readers of crime fiction. And yet, these three are fundamentally different writers. Child produces physical thrillers calling for violence and quick wits from his hero, Jack Reacher. P.D. James’s genteel whodunits depend on intellectual finesse and good sleuthing manners. And Kathy Reichs’s blood-soaked volumes are all about forensics and meticulously detailed autopsies.
The genre known as crime fiction doesn’t make up a single continuum. Crime novels in their diversity may share elements in common; almost always someone gets murdered and someone else solves the murder. But the books that tell the stories of death and sleuthing fall into different categories, reflecting crime fiction’s enormous heterogeneity. Some categories are obvious, some subtle — and all of them, as the following sampling indicates, qualify as the genre’s legitimate sub-genres.
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http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2014/10/17/crime_fiction_dictionary_from_cozies_to_hick_lit_and_everything_in_between.html
