Sex Sells. So Why Don't I Write It?

“This book tells the story of a beautiful, adventurous woman who meets a former government assassin-turned-flight instructor and experiences the best sex of her life.”

If I told you that was the premise of a wildly successful novel, you probably wouldn’t bat an eye. If I told you that it was the premise of my next Cordell Logan mystery, you’d probably wonder whether I’d finally lost it.

The truth is, sex has always sold books. Publishers have known that since the beginning of, well, publishing. Long before social media discovered the phrase “spicy fiction,” readers were happily buying novels in which romance and physical intimacy occupied center stage. Today, entire sections of bookstores are devoted to stories where the emotional—and often physical—relationship between two characters is every bit as important as the plot itself. Millions of readers love them, and judging by the bestseller lists, they’re not slowing down anytime soon.

Good for them.

Meanwhile, there’s another corner of the book publishing world, the one where I live, where the boundaries are remarkably different.

The Curious Rules of Mystery Fiction

Avid mystery readers have no objection to people murdering each other, often in the most gruesome ways. They’ll happily follow a detective through crime scenes littered with bodies and blood. But spend three pages vividly describing what happens when two consenting adults get busy in the bedroom, and many of those same readers will decide your book is not for them.

It’s one of mystery publishing’s more curious contradictions: violence is acceptable; explicit sex generally is not.

That’s not to suggest mystery readers are prudish. Far from it. They come looking for puzzles, suspense, clever plotting, memorable characters, and the satisfaction of watching order gradually emerge from chaos. Sex may enhance those elements, but it rarely replaces them.

As a writer of mysteries, you ignore those expectations at your peril.

Learning the Unwritten Rules

When I wrote my first Cordell Logan novel, nobody handed me a guidebook specifying

“Maximum Number of Bedroom Scenes Before Readers Revolt.” Instead, I did what most writers do. I read authors I admired. Lee Child. Robert Crais. Michael Connelly. Robert B. Parker. John Sandford. They all wrote believable relationships. Their characters fell in love. They flirted. They occasionally woke up together. But they seldom lingered in the bedroom. The physical relationship wasn’t unimportant. It simply wasn’t the point.

The point was what happened after everybody put their cloths back on.

Closing the Bedroom Door

And so, from the beginning, I made a conscious decision to keep most of Logan’s romantic encounters offstage I wasn’t writing bodice rippers. Romance. I was writing mysteries.

Every scene in a well-crafted mystery has to earn its place. Every chapter has to increase tension, or deepen character, or reveal important information, all th while moving the investigation and the plot forward. If two characters become romantically involved, what matters isn’t necessarily the intimacies of the evening. It’s how those intimacies changes what comes next. Do they complicate the investigation? Do they cloud the protagonist’s judgment, or distract him/her from ultimately solving the mystery? As a writer, those questions are almost always more intriguing than what happened after the lights went out.

Why Sex Scenes Are So Hard to Write

There’s another reason you won’t find explicit sex scenes in my books. They’re fiendishly difficult to write well. Push the prose too far one way, and it reads like an anatomy lecture. Push it too far the other, and you’re auditioning to write for Cinemax circa 1997. Every novelist eventually confronts that balancing act. I certainly have. In my experience, the hardest part isn’t writing the scene—it’s knowing what to leave out. That’s where restraint becomes a virtue, because readers’ imaginations are almost always better than anything I could ever put on the page.

One of the first lessons I learned years ago as a newspaperman is that you don’t have to explain everything. Readers are smart. Give them enough information to understand what’s happening, then trust them to connect the dots. The same principle applies to fiction.

n fact, what happens over breakfast the next morning often tells us far more about how the previous night unfolded than anything that happened in the bedroom itself. Sometimes it’s immediately obvious the two people have made a terrible mistake. Sometimes it’s equally clear they’ve discovered something extraordinary together. Either way, the emotional aftermath is usually more revealing than the physical act.A lingering glance. Those moments linger with readers because they’re about emotional intimacy rather than physical mechanics and that, for my money, is where relationships truly become interesting.

Why I’ll Probably Keep Closing the Bedroom Door

Publishing changes. Reader tastes evolve. What’s considered conventional today may well seem quaint ten years from now. Mystery fiction, like every other genre, certainly will continue to evolve. As for me, whether I’m writing about Cordell Logan or some future hero I haven’t yet imagined, they’ll continue to fall in love. They’ll make questionable romantic decisions. They’ll occasionally have their hearts broken. And every now and then they’ll encounter someone who changes them in ways they never expected.

Those are the relationships that matter.

Not because the sex was unforgettable—though sometimes it undoubtedly is—but because from that moment forward, life is no longer quite the same. The right person can make us braver. Kinder. More reckless. More forgiving. They can force us to confront parts of ourselves we’d rather leave undiscovered. They can change the course of an investigation or the rest of days on this planet.

Those are the relationships that matter, in fiction as well as life.