Week Six, Assignment Two: Explore and comment on a Prezi link, by Alex Herzberg

Over all this is a good and well-thought-out flow chart of fiction genres and subgenres.  My friend Monty has something erudite to say about the history and relationship between science fiction and fantasy -- which Herzberg makes a genre and subgenre, respectively -- which makes a lot of sense to me. 

My biggest reservation about this chart is Herzberg's opinion that "culinary capers" and "pet investigators" are both subgenres of Mystery, equal to (in his hierarchy) "cozies," but I would argue that those two are sub-subgenres of "cozies."  They are simply "cozies" with heightened emphasis on food and pets, rather than something new and different.

In my not-so-humble opinion, the Mystery genre is only really broken into four major subgenres: Detective fiction, Cozies, Hard-boiled, and Police procedurals.  There's a lot of overlap between them -- Cozies may (and usually do) feature a detective, usually an amateur like a Miss Marple or a Nancy Drew, and usually employing the methods of induction and logic first presented by Poe with his detective stories featuring Auguste Dupin. 

Detective stories may feature a "hard-boiled" detective like Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer, but may be equally at home with more sedate investigators like Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance.

There are also sub-subgenres like "whodunits," and in contrast there are some that may feature crime but no solution -- I'm thinking of Jim Thompson in particular.   Thompson's books are very hard to categorize -- he was more a writer on criminal psychology than a conventional "mystery writer."

Maybe "hard-boiled" is more a style than a genre.  Hemingway, Hammett, Chandler, Thompson and many others wrote in what we might call a "hard-boiled" style, but they don't really share much more than a clipped style, pithy sentences, a certain cynicism and/or "world weariness." 

Herzberg's "Foreign intrigue" doesn't need to be separated out at all from his other subgenres.  I can imagine a non-English-language librarian classing everyone from Rita Mae Brown to Agatha Christie to Charles Dickens under "Foreign intrigue" if its major identifying characteristic is just that it's set in a place that's "not here."

A nicely done flowchart but imperfect, as all human endeavors are.