So I've written my first novel, and I don't exactly know what genre it falls under. The main character is a heroin addict. He overdoses in the beginning of the book, offering him a moment of clarity. When he leaves where he is with his friend they witness a car accident and a man dropping a duffel bag off the road and onto a gravel canal walkway. The main character decides to look in the bag and it's a large amount of heroin. He decides this is his chance to get some money and leave the state, get a fresh start. First, he has to sell it. It is fast paced and action packed--violence and swearing. Would this be thriller? Crime Thriller? Some obscure sub-genre like "Neo-Noir"? Any help is appreciated. In the spirit of brevity I didn't want to make this a long post going into extreme details about the work. If anyone has a question, feel free to ask. Thanks in advance.
Thank you for the reply. I'm leaning toward Crime Thriller myself. The problem I run into is that most definitions I come across say that one of the defining characteristics of "crime thriller" is detectives and such--regular good guys. My protagonist is anything but a regular good guy. I don't know. The only reason I'm so worried about it is in terms of querying. What I don't want to happen is query some agents who want crime fiction, reading it, and throwing it out because this is not their definition of crime fiction.
I don't know a lot about crime thrillers but I'd think there would be a fair few morally-questionable anti-hero types in the genre. Sketchy PIs and the like? Maybe not a lot of outright criminal protags, to be fair, but as far as I'm awake it is a genre that questions moral legalities so I would think that someone looking to do something sketchy for the chance to finally go straight would be at home there.
Thanks izzybot, I will probably continue to think of it as a crime thriller and query in that same category. I suppose all I can do is make sure my writing is so good that agents can't turn it down. HA!
I'd keep it simple and just go with thriller. You don't need to be exact at the query stage, as long as you're in the right general area.
So it sounds like kind of like thriller. The difference between a mystery premise and a thriller is that with a thriller you usually have some sort of external element that's either chasing the characters or forcing them to get something done within a very compressed amount of time, and that sense of having a countdown to something bad happening is the generator of tension. With a mystery premise - which is also a lot of your crime procedurals - the tension is generated by not knowing who did whatever it was, and the tension is generated by the search. There can definitely be crossover, but thrillers definitely have that looming countdown clock element.
It's a crime fiction. Subcategories include: suspense, thriller, detective, action, and/or adventure. Cannot say what yours is without more information. It can have multiple subcategories.
A guy who gets hold of some drugs, and has to do dubious things to make some money out of them as a means of getting out of his financial troubles? "Breaking Bad is an American crime drama television series"