From his CrimeReads interview with Lisa Levy:
LL: Is this book crime fiction?Visit Rob Hart's website.
RH: In my head it’s still crime fiction because there’s there there’s a drug ring and there’s corporate espionage and there’s an overarching mystery to the whole story.
You know what crime fiction tends to evoke is very much on the street level whereas there’s a mix of a lot of stuff here that’s coming from a higher level. Look at the heroin crisis for example. If you trace that all the way back to the genesis it was pharmaceutical companies who were asking doctors to prescribe opioids and were squashing the thoughts about their different nature. And that sort of exploded to where we get tons and tons of street crime and tons and tons of people using drugs. It was really because a bunch of rich assholes wanted to be rich.
At the end of the day a book has a social conscience. I would argue that The Great Gatsby is a crime novel.
LL: I did argue The Great Gatsby is a crime novel.
RH: There we go. It’s about a gangster and it revolves around his murder. That’s very much a crime.
And at the end of the day everything’s a mystery. You don’t know what the ending is, but technically everything is a mystery if it’s not in the nonfiction section. Genre labels are kind of funny. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I’ve been in this sort of speculative sci-fi whatever...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: Potter's Field.
The Page 69 Test: Potter's Field.
Writers Read: Rob Hart (July 2018).
--Marshal Zeringue