My clash with ‘sensitivity readers’

‘The end of the novel’: so ran a headline in the Times recently. Well, every few years one pundit or another predicts the death of the novel. They have done so throughout my lifetime and by now many of them may well be deceased themselves. But this article cogently pointed out the dangers of the new culture wars whereby writers are castigated for writing about ethnicities or events outside their own ‘lived experience’. Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt was probably the most notorious example but even John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas attracted criticism. Could it be that my next murder mystery will have a killer, a victim, a list of suspects and even an amateur detective who are all middle-aged white Jewish London-based men? That seems to be the way we’re heading.

In fact, my last murder story contained a character who was Native American. I deliberately added him to provoke some sort of discussion about this very subject.