Page 11 of Beachfront Pages

"Fiona." She didn't offer a last name. She'd gotten careful about that, though in this case there was no reason to be. Nobody here would connect Wells to Maxwell. Nobody ever did. "I'm staying out at the lighthouse cottages."

"The writer." He glanced up then. Hazel eyes behind glasses he brought down from his forehead the way a man did when he'd already lost them twice before lunch. "Winnie mentioned you."

"Of course she did."

"She mentions everybody. It's how she runs the town without holding office." He set the box cutter down. "So what do you read?"

"Mysteries, mostly."

His face shifted. It wasn't quite a wince. It was more of a polite rearrangement, the kind a person made when they were trying not to say what they thought and failing at it.

"Mysteries," he said.

"You have feelings about that?"

"I have feelings about most things. It's an occupational hazard." He pulled a stack of books from the box and began sorting them on the counter. Literary fiction, from the look of the covers. Spare and serious. "Mysteries are fine. They're well-built machines. Very efficient. You sit down, somebody dies, somebody figures out who did it, and then you buy the next one." He looked up at her.

"That's a… um… generous summary."

"I'm being generous." He shelved a slim volume without looking at the spine, like he already knew where it belonged. "The machinery's clever. I'll give it that. But there's nothing underneath. No ambiguity. No moral weight. The detective always solves it. The world always makes sense at the end. That's not literature. That's comfort food."

A tightness caught inside her. Not anger, exactly. Sharper than that. More personal than she had any right to feel in a bookshop with a man she'd met forty-five seconds ago.

"Comfort food keeps people alive," she said.

"So does bread. I wouldn't call it cuisine."

"You might if you'd ever been hungry enough."

He stopped shelving and looked at her properly. She could feel him recalibrating, the way a man did when a conversation went somewhere he hadn't planned.

"Fair point," he said. And then, because he wasn't done, "But the best mysteries, the ones that actually last, they work because they're doing more than the puzzle. Christie's doing class. Some mystery authors do psychology. The ones that endure smuggle real literature inside the genre. The rest is just plot."

"The rest is just plot," she repeated. She should leave it alone. She knew she should leave it alone. She was a woman named Fiona who wrote small stuff nobody had heard of, and this was not her fight.

But she'd had this argument before, hadn't she? Every cocktail party where a literary novelist looked at her sales numbers, then at her genre, and decided the two couldn't go together. Every awards dinner where the mystery category got scheduled after dessert, when half the room had already gone home.

"You know what the mystery genre does that literary fiction won't?" she said. "It makes a promise. Beginning, middle, end. Justice, or at least understanding. A reader picks it up knowing the author is going to hold up their end of the deal. That's not a flaw. That's a reader promise."

"A promise." He said it slowly, as if he was tasting the word.

"Between the writer and the reader. You will be confused, and then you will understand. I will not leave you stranded in ambiguity just because ambiguity is more respectable." She was talking too much. She could hear herself talking too much, the way she did when somebody pushed a button she'd welded shut years ago. "Literary fiction gets to shrug at the ending and call it art. Genre fiction has to earn the ending or the reader walks. I'd argue earning it is harder."

He leaned against the counter. His glasses were up on his forehead again. She noticed he did that. Up and down, up and down, like they couldn't decide where they lived.

"You know a lot about this for someone who just reads mysteries."

She pulled back. She'd said too much. A casual reader didn't use words like reader promise. A casual reader didn't have a rehearsed defense of genre fiction's structural contract with the audience.

"I read a lot," she said. Lightly. "And I had a professor in college who made us read Chandler alongside Faulkner. It stuck."

"Good professor." He was watching her the way he'd watched the book spines, assessing and categorizing, deciding where she fit on the shelf. "Chandler's the exception, though."

"Chandler's the example. The rest are the proof."

He almost smiled. Not quite, but the shape of it was there, pulling at the corners of his mouth.

"You should talk to Hal Gardner. He's in here every week asking me to order another F. L. Maxwell book. We have this argument regularly, though he makes it with less vocabulary."