25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
3 new novels offer thrills with a campy sense of style
Campy crime has nothing to do with tents and roasting marshmallows. It's not the zany comedy of 'Meatballs,' nor the horror of 'Friday the Thirteenth.' A campy crime novel has themes and preoccupations derived from Susan Sontag's 1964 essay 'Notes on Camp.' In Sontag's theory, camp can include playing with gender roles; gaudy settings that run from glamorous to cringey; delightfully over-the-top characters; and a context in which extravagance is expected. Sontag wrote that camp 'converts the serious into the frivolous,' and camp mysteries take this to heart; they over-index on style and have no truck with gore or violence. They embrace artifice, exaggeration and glamour.
