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The most important analytic category for fan-readers is character. Fans talk about characters as if they were real people. Many describe a book as "company," and think about reading books about a series detective as spending time with a friend, without any of the demands of human relationships. Readers overwhelmingly prefer protagonists like themselves, detectives whose gender, education, class background, occupation, or life situation resembles their own. The fluid boundary between readers' lives and the stories they choose to read, then, offers opportunities to think through their own concerns while reading, to "try on" ways of being in the world (physically courageous, mouthy, brave) through a protagonist's adventures.

Inevitably, a question about a particular book ("I don't know that one. Tell me about it.") is interpreted as a question about the protagonist. At the close of a response, fans have described the main character's history and personal/professional situation, but have said nothing at all about what happens in the book. If pushed, they will struggle to remember the plot, but most often end with an apology and an explanation, "They all run together." Clearly, the boundaries of the text for readers are not the plot structures that interest scholars, but the subjectivity or personality of the protagonist. Everything about a series character is recalled as a unit, with little memory of which specific texts these details come from.

Although important, identification with main characters is only one of many ways of reading. Settings loom large for some readers. Reviews of mysteries frequently praise the realism in the descriptions of cities, noting the faithfulness with which authors reproduced the local color of specific neighborhoods and landmarks. Many readers prefer to read books set in places they have lived or visited. Some plan to read local authors while in a new city. Many readers carry around a mental atlas of mysteries, including categories such as "New Orleans mysteries" or "Italian murders." In this way, the books can operate like photographs, inviting readers to remember their own experiences in that place, or like brochures from the travel agent, inviting readers to imagine what visiting or living in such a place might be like.

References:

1.         Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave, 2004.

2.         Reddy, Maureen T. Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

3.         Smith, Erin A. " 'Both a Woman and a Complete Professional': Women Readers and Women's Hard-boiled Detective Fiction." In Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, ed. Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth Flynn, 189-220. New York: Modern Language Association Press, 2004.

4.         Smith, Erin A. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

5.         Soitos, Stephen. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

6.         Walton, Priscilla L., and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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