Label-ous

There's an ongoing discussion about labels in mystery and crime fiction, which affects authors, agents, editors, publishers, booksellers and librarians. Do you classific a novel as a cozy? A thriller? Police procedural? P.I. novel (and if so, hard-boiled, soft-boiled, medium-boiled, noir)? Suspense? Romantic suspense?

It may seem like a relatively innocuous topic to some folks, especially those outside the industry, but it can make a world of difference to how a book is perceived and marketed, and even affect potential book sales. Librarians have been dealing with this problem for years by using appeal characteristics to help guide readers toward books they might like, elements like pacing (the pacing for a thriller should be different than the pacing for a historical, for instance), setting, language, emotion, character, idea, etc.

Librarian Barry Trott, who is Chair of the RUSA CODES Readers' Advisory Committee and develops read-alike lists for NoveList, wrote a book which was published in December of last year titled Read On...Crime Fiction: Reading Lists for Every Taste, in which he set out to classify crime fiction works using appeal characteristics. So instead of listing titles according to "normal" genres and subgenres, he categorizes hundreds of popular crime fiction titles according to five broad features: character, setting, story, language and mood--and then into thematic lists as "Reading the Bones," "Dynamic Duos," "Love you to Death," and "Bright Lights, Dead Bodies." For each title, he also offers bibliographic information and a brief description.

If you're going to use labels at all to describe crime fiction, I think this appeals to me more than the regular subgenre categories, as so many tend to straddle more than one type. After all, nowadays how would a publisher or bookseller categorize Sherlock Holmes? He's an amateur, so that must make those stories cozies, right? Or Nero wolf? Sure, Archie's a P.I., but Wolf himself is an "amateur," so thus another cozy, by today's yardstick. Ellery Queen? He's an amateur, but his Dad and cohorts are police officers, so it's part amateur, part police procedural. How would you market that one? Where would the bookseller place it on the shelves (if not just using alphabetical indexing)?

So what do you think? Should we adopt appeal characteristics a la the American Library Association to use instead of the more-familiar labels? Or would that make it even more confusing?