Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
I know there are lots of mystery lovers here, and I am one of them. So tonight let’s talk about the best mystery genres, with an eye toward featuring some of those sub-genres on future Medium Cool posts.
Let’s nominate / discuss / consider the various sub-genres of mysteries and which are your favorites, and then we can argue for / fight about / debate which ones are the best.
If you are passionate about a particular sub-genre of mystery and you would be interested in writing something up to get us started talking about your favorite sub-genre of mystery, send me an email and let us know in the comments.
For tonight, I’m going to let CaseyL start the conversation with her comment from last December.
My hand is up waving, in enthusiastic support for a Medium Cool focus on mysteries.
Mystery is one of my main fiction genres, and one of the things I love about the genre is its infinite capacity for hybridization with other genres. Way beyond the “hard boiled” v. “cozy,” mysteries can be historical (including alt.historical), romantical, and science fictional. About my only requirement is that, whatever logic the universe in that mystery operates on, it be consistent.
I’m a particular sucker for historical mysteries. They’re everywhere and everywhen: Medieval Europe, Tudor/Elizabethan England, Ancient Egypt… I think there are even some set in pre-Columbian America. I love Lindsey Davis’ books set in Imperial Rome. She does an excellent job of milieu-building, so that you can get a feel for what everyday life was like. I’ve hopped around some of the other historicals, and enjoyed them, but none have made the impression Davis has.
Then there are the mysteries set in other countries and cultures, so the reader gets to learn something about those other countries and cultures. Donne Leon lived in Venice for over 30 years, and reading her mysteries has a poignance beyond the books themselves, as she unwittingly chronicled how Venice became unliveable (slowly, then quickly) for residents who weren’t ultra wealthy, with her main characters noting, and lamenting, the social, environmental, and economic changes as they happened.
TL;DR: you can do anything within the structure of a mystery. It’ll be fun to talk about!
So, BJ peeps, what’s your favor sub-genre of mystery?
War for Ukraine Day 466: Shush!
Mr. Prosser
I’m fond of the medieval mystery series about Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters. There are other series set in the same time period but I think Peters created a very sympathetic and complicated character in Cadfael.
JoyceH
I like cozies, but I prefer the older ones, before the genre got so rule-bound and fragmented. Get on a writing list and you’ll quickly learn that a mystery canNOT be a ‘cozy’ unless you have an amateur sleuth. Well, sorry, but Patricia Moyes’ mysteries are as cozy as they come, and her sleuth Henry Tibbett is a Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard. But those are cozies – they just are.
And the segmentation! You can’t just say you like cozies anymore without specifying a sub-sub-genre. There are crafting cozies and cooking cozies and cat cozies and magical cozies and magical cat cozies… oh and on!
JPL
Grafton really created a masterpiece and always kept her characters true to form She didn’t try to jump ahead with all the technological changes because that would have meant that Henry and Rosie were no longer with us.
On the other hand, I love Gamache and so want to move to Three Pines.
RSA
What a coincidence! I was at a Goodwill yesterday (mainly to decorate the blank walls of a newly-rented house) and I picked up a copy of The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, edited by Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler. Hillerman’s writing was a wonderful introduction to Navajo culture, with a solid police procedural backbone in the novels.
Alison Rose
I admit I do have love for cozies, the mass-market kind with punny titles and quirky settings. Some of them suck (but then some books in any subgenre suck) but some are fun and they’re also a nice easy read. I can get through one in two days and they don’t take a lot of mental investment.
I’ve been reading the Kinsey Millhone series through my library, and I agree in general they’re well-done, though there have been a few stinkers thus far. Also, because of when they were written, sometimes there is some YIKES language and commentary, and my kingdom for the day Kinsey stops judging everyone else by their weight when she eats nothing but fast food and donuts.
I tend to prefer thrillers that lean more psychological, and avoid ones that rely on gore or jumpscares or that people say left them so creeped out, they slept with the light on or something. I want the fun of a mystery but I do not find “getting the crap scared out of me” to be fun.
Geminid
Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth might not be categorized as a mystery, but it revolves around a mystery: the identity of Jack Builder’s father and the fate of the White Ship.
cope
I’m not sure they fall into the “mystery” genre but I have always been a sucker for heist stories. My all time favorite is the movie “Thief” with James Caan.
I can go all the way back to “Topkapi” impressing me as a kid.
smith
I read a lot of mysteries, but am a cranky old curmudgeon, so I can more easily say which sub-genres I dislike than those I like.
Here are two exceptions: First, what I call “Big Sheriff in a Small Town” mysteries. The top of this class, in my opinion, is Craig Johnson’s Longmire series. Heroes in this type of book are not always the sheriff –they might be a Lieutenant in a small city force (Archer Mayor’s Joe Gunther, Kate Flora’s Joe Burgess ), or the chief of police (Terry Shames’ Samuel Craddock) or former chief of police (William Kent Kreuger’s Cork O’Connor). What they have in common is a hero with a long history in a small community. It seems to me that the in-depth knowledge the investigator has of the characters in the drama adds to the emotional resonance of crime’s impact on the community.
The other sub-genre I read a lot is British police procedurals, of which there are too many to list. I like them better than American ones, I think, because the cops are rarely armed, so they have to work out their dilemmas without simply blowing the bad guys away. I also really enjoy reading detailed explanations of forensic procedures, the more complicated the better.
Scout211
I’m not a fan of cozy mysteries, where the focus of the book is on the puzzle that needs to be be solved, no matter what type of interesting characters are part of the puzzle. I’ve read many and almost all of them are too cerebral for me.
I lean toward suspense, thrillers (especially legal thrillers) and my favorite sub genre, romantic suspense. The characters and their relationships are more the focus of the book, with the crime, suspects and investigation as a backdrop.
martha
@smith: I’m with you on British and Irish police procedurals. Two of my favorites lately are Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series, set during “The Troubles” and Peter Granger’s DI Smith series. McKinty has a new Sean Duffy book coming out in August, I think.
But there are several and it just irritates me that I can’t get some of them here in Kindle yet.
WaterGirl
@Alison Rose: Based on what you said, I have to ask… are cozies the Hallmark movies of books?
bbleh
They may not qualify exactly as mysteries, but if it ain’t whodunit then whoizit is close. I like both the books and the movie adaptations of “John Le Carré”s stuff. (And re Brit/Irish, a shout out to Sir Ian Rankin and John Rebus. And crrraaaayzee stuff like Carl
HiassenHiaasen, thank you piratedan.)piratedan
I think there are great examples in all of the flavors of Mystery fiction, not too concerned about the rules per se…
For a historical/alternate fiction read it’s still hard to top H. Bean Piper’s “He Walked Around The Horses”
For your classical American settings, I’ve always enjoyed Lawrence Block’s “Burgler” series, but there’s so MANY great ones to enjoy, but I do enjoy the ones that have a sense of absurdity to them (Carl Hiaasen to be sure).
In order to expand my horizons, I’ve come to appreciate Donna Leon, Vaseem Khan, Richard Osman, Jussi Adler-Olsen and the like….
to expand my universe, Larry Niven, Martha Wells, Lois McMaster Bujold and Glen Cook.
all we can do is provide each other ample fodder for new/as-of-yet undiscovered talent.
Amir Khalid
I liked the first two Cormoran Strike mysteries by that Rowling person. I thought Cormoran and his assistant had a quirky, intriguing relationship that hinted at romantic possibilities at some point well down the line. I liked the glamorous/seedy settings of the mysteries themselves. Then the murders started going way over the top, and she lost me.
smith
@martha: Absolutely agree about Grainger’s DC Smith. So many detective heroes are troubled souls with tragic pasts, it’s great to read about one who’s fully grounded in his adult life.
Tehanu
I’m not a particular fan of any particular mystery subgenre; there are great writers of almost every type, police procedural, historical, cozy small-town, violent / noir big-city, you name it. What I really enjoy about mysteries isn’t so much the puzzle aspect as the fact that you can learn so much about all kinds of professions and milieus along with the puzzle: bell-ringing in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors; medieval jesters in Alan Gordon’s Fools Guild books; modern policing in Britain in Deborah Crombie’s Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James series; anthropology & forensics in Aaron Elkins’ Gideon Oliver books; Navajo culture in Tony Hillerman’s (and his daughter Anne Hillerman’s) books; etc. etc. etc., I could go on for ages. I also agree with CaseyL about Lindsay Davis’ ancient Rome books and of course, Brother Cadfael (in fact, let me put in a plug for Ellis Peters’ other mysteries, the ones set in 1950s England, my favorite of which is The Knocker on Death’s Door).
Alison Rose
@WaterGirl: Hahaha, some of them could definitely be described as such! They can certainly be a little corny at times, and sometimes the dialogue sounds like it was written by an alien whose only experience with English is soap operas and infomercials. But again, they can also be good fun. I particularly like the Bakeshop Mystery series by Ellie Alexander, the Black Cat Bookshop Mystery series by Ali Brandon, and the Book Retreat Mysteries by Ellery Adams.
JPL
@Alison Rose: Where does Anthony Horowitz fit? I have enjoyed all his novels.
Phylllis
@smith: British procedurals are my go-to as well. Do spy stories count in this? Currently racing through the Slough House series.
prostratedragon
Just bopped over from finishing an episode of Murdoch Mysteries, a Canadian series that is available on Acorn and in part on Prime. NotMax mentioned it the other day, but perhaps it wasn’t clear for those who’ve never seen it that this is a historical series, set at the turn of the last century. The tone is fairly comic, so there is plenty of playing with the fact that so many devices and social customs of the present were just beginning during that time. There are also various continuing subplots —the show’s been running for 16 seasons— but a recent episode called “Murdoch Rides Easy” is a nice sampler for which no previous knowledge is necessary. Our doughty detective, William Murdoch of the Toronto constabulary, solves a murder with the help of two young men named Arthur Davidson and William Harley who are passing through town for an exhibition.
Pete Downunder
First I must agree with the fans of Grafton and Hillerman, both excellent. I have three offerings in wildly different genres. First are Arthur Upfield’s Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte series set in the 30-s to early 60’s in outback Australia. They are a little slow moving and there is a lot of the casual racism that sadly exists downunder even today. But the lead character, a half-caste detective, is engaging and the stories are fun. Long out of print but used book dealers can usually supply them.
Next up are the magic detective Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch (he started by writing for Dr Who) set mostly in modern London. The characters are interesting once you accept the premise that magic really exists in the world and someone has to police it.
Finally, and full disclosure there is a family connection, the Henry Kennis series by Steven Axelrod. Kennis is the fictional chief of police on Nantucket and the six books (so far) in the series are well plotted and give an insight on the island. Kennis is an ex-LA cop and a poet.
Because I’m old I also have what I think are the complete Nero Wolfe mysteries by the polymath Rex Stout and the wildly prolific Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter, birth name Salvatore Albert Lombino) and his 87th precinct mysteries as well as his Matthew Hope stories with fairy tale titles. All probably out of print but still good reads.
karen marie
A shoutout for Ben Aaronovitch’s “Rivers of London” series. It’s part mystery, part – I don’t know what you call it – fantasy, magical realism? I listen to them on Audible. They’re all read well by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (except for the first book which he read way too fast). The main character – Peter Grant, a newly minted constable – is chosen as an apprentice to the only remaining official police magician after it’s become clear that magic has not disappeared. The rivers of London each have their physical representative – or god/goddess – who help and hinder investigations.
I’d listened to the first two a while back, recently downloaded the third one, and I’m relistening to the first two before going on to the third because it’s been so long. I think they’re entertaining with vanishingly few points that I’m going “oh, come the fuck on.”
If you haven’t read Westlake – either his comic crime capers or his hard crime novels – you’re doing it wrong. He’s one of the most brilliant writers ever. Definitely in my top three.
John D. MacDonald is also a very good mystery/crime writer. So many books, so little time!
Ann Marie
I like a lot of different types of mysteries, but I’m with CaseyL in loving historical mysteries. I started with Cadfael, and have since read great series set in medieval Spain, Byzantine Constantinople, Japan (both Heian and Edo), and three separate series in ancient Egypt, but the ones I keep going back to are the series from ancient Rome, at least four series so far, only two of which overlap in time. I love the view into a different place and time, along with clever mysteries and some humor in my favorites.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@martha: I really like the Sean Duffy series. They’re great stories, and I like the way he uses famous people like Mohammed Ali and John DeLorean as cameos in the books.
McKinty nearly quit writing at one point because he couldn’t make enough money to live on.
karen marie
@Pete Downunder: HEY! I was writing MY recommendation of Aaronovitch at the same time as you!
smith
@Scout211: I also don’t like cozies, but for a different reason: The amateur sleuths, if you look at them outside of the immediate mystery context, are actually pretty obnoxious characters. I would hate to live anywhere near anybody so arrogantly nosy as so many of those women are (they’re almost always women). Very often it goes so far as to their sneaking into someone’s private space and rifling through their belongings. In real life you’d take out a restraining order.
Alison Rose
@JPL: No idea, I’m not familiar with his work.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@smith: I thought “cozy” just meant the mysteries weren’t high tension, so the reader could relax. Is that not right?
Pete Downunder
@karen marie:
A new one staring the American FBI agent (whose name escapes me at the moment but appeared first in Whispers Underground) is due out 8 June. I’ve pre-ordered.
Lethe
I’m sorry to say my pure (?) mystery reading had been confined to Dorothy Sayers and Agathe Christie for years, my focus had been more sci-fi with Bujold. Then a friend suggested Robert van Gulick’s Judge Dee books. That was an amazing introduction to reading about detectives and mysteries from another culture. I think I’ve got notes from every comment here on what to try next.
Ken
I’m rather fond of science-fiction time-travel philosophical comedy-of-manners romantic mysteries, but as far as I know the only example of that sub-sub-genre is Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog.
TS
@Alison Rose:
Exactly my thoughts & along this line I can’t get past PD James – every few years I go back and read them again. The only negative is she should never have tried to marry off Dalgleish – romance she does not write well.
Mike in NC
We’re watching Series 3 (Season 3) of “Happy Valley” with Sarah Lancashire. Gritty modern cop show set in and around Yorkshire, England.
Karen S.
I’ve enjoyed the Shardlake series by C.J. Sansom. The novels are set during the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century. Shardlake, the protagonist, is a barrister who is also a hunchback. He ends solving mysteries through his work first for Thomas Cromwell and then for Archbishop Cranmer. The novels are atmospheric and gripping. Disney has greenlit a TV series based on the novels. I’m curious to see how it turns out.
I have also enjoyed early Walter Mosley, such as Devil in A Blue Dress and Red Death, and the Blanche White series by Barbara Neely. Their books are mystery novels, yes, but they are layered with and undergirded by issues of class and race in the U.S. in the mid to late 20th century.
Orange is the New Red
I am a huge fan of Michael Gilbert, who wrote in several subgenres but was never cozy. I particularly favor his spy stories featuring Mr Calders and Mr Behrens. He’s most famous, apparently, for his first book, Smallbone Deceased.
Tehanu
@Ken: To Say Nothing of the Dog is hilarious, I just re-read it for about the 4th or 5th time! Of course, it ties in with Willis’ other time-travel books that are more serious — the great Doomsday Book, which is maybe the greatest historical novel I’ve ever read as well as SF, and the two-decker Blackout / All Clear.
martha
@Phylllis: Love, love, love the Slough House series. The McKinty series has the same dark humor/tragedy/comedy bent.
bbleh
Totally saving this thread. There’s at least a couple years’ fun reading here.
JPL
@Alison Rose: He writes the Magpie Mysteries that were featured on PBS. It’s what I view as the cozy mysterie.
Alison Rose
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It can certainly be used in that more general sense, yes. But most people who talk about being “cozy mystery readers” are specifically meaning the types I described, though of course they don’t have to include all of those elements. But there’s usually gonna be an amateur sleuth who often has a quirky job, they’re often set in small towns, there’s a big cast of characters, all of whom seem guilty at one point or another, often one person who you think might be the killer turns up dead themselves, etc. You can totally call a mystery “cozy” just to mean it’s not gory or creepy, but it does have a specific subgenre attached to it.
Alison Rose
@JPL: Ah, right, okay. They probably could, yeah. I looked one up on Goodreads and a number of readers shelved it as cozy. So long as there isn’t graphic violence on page and it’s mainly about solving a crime and not about “as much blood and guts and nightmare fuel as we can cram in”, then it can certainly count :)
smith
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Cozies tend not to be particularly gut-wrenching, but they also have a number of conventions that are quite frequently applied. One is the amateur sleuth who, most often in my experience, is a middle-aged to older woman. They also tend to be set in relatively closed environments as, for instance, a small village or a boarding school, where there is not a large number of potential suspects to be considered. I’m sure there are other conventions, as @JoyceH alludes to above, but since I’m not an aficionado I can’t really describe them.
Craig
@martha: I’ve been reading Rhys Dylan’s DCI Warlow series. Rural Welsh police procedural. Pretty good stuff.
Phylllis
@martha: Adding those to my list. I’ve been doing a bit of dive into the history of ‘the troubles’ lately. Say Anything by Patrick Radden Keefe and There Will Be Fire by Rory Carroll were both excellent.
Carroll’s book read s like a thriller (about the hotel bombing that nearly killed Thatcher). It brought to mind Ebert’s review of Day of the Jackal, “a two hour and a half hour movie that seems over in fifteen minutes”.
mvr
I tend to like atmosphere and dialogue. Also some humor, though only a few “mysteries” do that in a way I like. So I find myself a fan of the several subgenres that Dashiell (sp?) Hammett spawned (or perhaps continued and spawned). The private eye who doesn’t work for the police and tends to work alone (Maltese Falcon). The sort of farcical but over the top binge tale. (Red Harvest) The story of someone who moves in an untrustworthy underworld where you can’t tell whom to trust including the protagonist (The Glass Key), and the semi-comic wise cracking detective duo (Nick & Nora of the Thin Man and the Dain Curse). I think of Hammett like Bob Dylan — one of the few detective (song) writers who can be great in several genres and who likely invented a couple.
That said my heart belongs to Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe because I liked the character a lot.
Hammett was more of a standup guy than Marlowe when he wasn’t writing. Didn’t snitch on his friends during the Red Scare and while he had affairs he apparently remained friends with his most famous ex. Chandler was at least a bit of a racist and a drunk who was not nice to his spouse at all. Still I love his combination of cynicism and idealism. (And the bit about catching a bug in a matchbox while he is high in police headquarters being questioned and then letting it go once he got outside is the kind of wonderful detail that makes me love his books.)
ColoradoGuy
Will triple down with the Connie Willis recommendation. You wouldn’t expect time travel to be a nail-biting thriller, but the organization running the time-travel system are both stunningly incompetent and also underfunded, so the protagonists have the system break down at the worst possible time. And by worst possible …
Craig
@mvr: The Continental Op is genius. Literally the Man With No Name. I love those stories. Red Harvest is a masterpiece.
kalakal
@Karen S.: The Shardlake books are excellent.
I very much enjoy puzzles in mystery stories eg Christie but also like ones that evoke a time or place.
One set I rather enjoyed was Dorothy Simpson’s Inspector Thanet mysteries. They’re basically police procedurals but the stories are set roughly in the year they were written so the characters age. Thanet is about 10 years older than me and isn’t a figure with a tragic past, filled with existential angst etc etc, just an ordinary, likeable bloke with ordinary concerns related to the times. The books evoked quite a few feelings of how England changed in my life. The mysteries are pretty good too!
mvr
@mvr:
Of course on the subject of irrelevant subplots of less than a page, Hammett had his own cool story about the guy who was just missed by a falling piano and disappeared only to recreate his life with another spouse and kids. (At least I think this was Hammett and not Chandler.)
Phylllis
Also enjoyed the first two books of the Brighton Mysteries Series, by Elly Griffiths. Starting in 1950, a detective and a magician* who served together in WWII, work together to solve murders. Going to get back them after I finish up Slough House.
*It works, trust me.
JPL
The Number 1 Ladies Detective Series by Alexander McCall smith is about as cozy as it gets. I think I learned more about the culture of Botswana from the series than any history book.
mvr
@Craig: Yeah, he just came up with so many ideas that worked in the mystery genre broadly speaking.
mrmoshpotato
I devoured Hardy Boys books as a kid. No idea what sub-genre they would be.
kalakal
I enjoy Simon Brett’s books, they’re funny and give a lot of insights as the environment they’re set in. The Mathew Paris ones are a great look at the theatrical life and the Fethering mysteries get English social nuances perfectly.
Omnes Omnibus
Sharon Kay Penman’s de Quincy mysteries are pretty good. They are set during Richard I’s captivity after his Crusade. High political intrigue and murder among the regular people.
kalakal
@Craig: So very true. I read an Omnibus of the Continental Op short stories. What was interesting was that the first one’s have no guns, no violence, they’re insurance fraud puzzles.
martha
@Craig: ohhh, now this author is on my list! Thank you.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’m reading this thread thinking me too! I like that one too! And that one and that one! There’s something comforting about knowing that other people have shared this story, this world with you when you didn’t even know it.
Ken
@mvr: The Maltese Falcon, I’m pretty sure.
Bex
@RSA: Anne Hillerman, Tony’s daughter, has kept up the series and done a great job. Chee and Bernadette are the main characters now and Leaphorn makes an occasional appearance. New one is set in Bears Ears…with comment (not favorable) on the previous administration’s wanting to reduce its size.
James E Powell
@JoyceH:
Cozy is a term I had never encountered before. I think they might be my favorite kind of mystery.
karen marie
@Ken: If you have Audible, “To Say Nothing of the Dog” is, I believe, a free listen right now.
I should probably listen to it soon because they don’t stay in the “free” section forever. I loved it when I read it years ago.
mvr
@Ken: Thanks, that was my best memory, but as I get older memories sometimes seem like guesses.
kalakal
James Anderson wrote a series of parodies of Christie/Sayers type books and the super sleuth detective story in general. They’re hilarious, rather like P G Wodehouse meets Agatha Christie,, but amazingly he makes it work. The plots are wonderfully convoluted but work both as genuine mysteries and as humour and the characters are a hoot.
The series is called the Inspector Wilkins mysteries and the titles are great
The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy The Affair of the Mutilated Mink Coat
The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks
karen marie
@Pete Downunder: I haven’t gotten that far yet. Any minute!
I agree that this has been a terrific thread with lots of great recommendations. Thanks, kids!
MagdaInBlack
@JPL: I was thinking of those. Also his series set in Edinburgh, tho not really mysteries.
MagdaInBlack
@JPL: I was thinking of those. Also his series set in Edinburgh, tho not really mysteries.
Miki
@Phylllis: Her Ruth Galloway series is also good (forensic anthropologist).
Narya
Those of you who like Cadfael probably would like the Sister Fidelma series.
blackmtn
I find it interesting to see how authors of long running series deal with the aging of their characters – and the changing of the times over the span of their novels. Some, like Nero Wolfe and Archie don’t age themselves, but the New York City around them keep up with the times. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone ages only little bit between books, and the world around her stays with her, so that her first book was concurrent with it’s publishing date, but by the end we’re decades behind. Others like Ian Rankin’s Rebus age out in the series.
Steeplejack
I think I’m fairly eclectic. I read in a lot of the subgenres, even cozy mysteries, although that’s the genre that gives me pause. There’s cozy and then there’s cute, and cute is right out for me. But sometimes it’s hard to tell going in. If it looks like a novelization of a Hallmark movie is a strong tell.
Let’s see. Recently I read all of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Peter Wimsey novels, and I have started on Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple books (have read one of each). And I just got done binge-reading Martha Wells’s Murderbot novels, which are science fiction with a pretty strong “mystery” overlay in most of them.
@Tehanu:
This, sort of. I think the “mystery,” or crime, gives the detective (professional or amateur) permission to delve into sections of society and into people’s lives and ask questions—and observe things—not ordinarily permitted. We get to go along and see the story behind the story. And the detective’s (or narrator’s, or author’s) perspective gives us additional illumination.
For some reason Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) comes to mind as an example. It had a striking effect when it came out because so much of it was new: a hard-boiled crime novel told by an unemployed Black guy sort of unintentionally becoming a private detective in 1948 Los Angeles. We’ve all read Raymond Chandler on that time and place, but this was a report from a “milieu” that had been virtually invisible before. It was a revelation.
And that’s what I think we look for in “mystery” novels—revelation and explanation. It can be huge or it can be as small as “mousy housewife really wanted to kill her husband; here’s how it got that way.” All of the variations are interesting.
Bex
@Karen S.: Love the Shardlake books. I haven’t seen a new one for a while and hope there will be more. You might enjoy the S.J. Parris series about heretic-turned-spy Giordano Bruno, a character based on a real person, set in the late 1500s.
kalakal
Cyril Hare wrote some great mysteries that perfectly capture the English Legal system in the 30s & 40s seen through the eyes of a semi successful barrister who could be the role model for John Mortimer’s Rumpole.
Tragedy at Law is particularly good
Narya
Also: KC Constantine
mvr
@Steeplejack: This is an astute/instructive comment.
Karen S.
@Bex: Thanks for the recommendation!
Karen S.
@Narya: I’ve just started the Sister Fidelma series. I’ve finished the first two and enjoyed them a great deal.
Miki
I’ve been reading Peter May’s Enzo Files recently (Italian/Scottish Professor of Forensics in France solving 7 cold case murders using modern forensic science and a lot of intuition). His Lewis Trilogy was also very good.
Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad mysteries are excellent and worth reading more than once.
TheOtherHank
I was living in Santa Barbara when Grafton started publishing her series. It was fun to figure out how things in Santa Theresa mapped onto Santa Barbara. State Street is in both towns, but SB’s Anacapa is ST’s Anaconda, SB’s Carillo is ST’s Capillo. I think my favorite was when Kinsey talked to someone in Jordan’s Kitchen Suppy on Capillo and in the Santa Barbara of that time there was a Jordano’s Kitchen Supply on Carillo.
On the subject of Tony Hillerman’s books, I have a question. I read a few of them back in the day, but stopped reading them when it seemed like the killer was always some minor white character that was introduced early in the book and then almost never heard from again until the unveiling. Are they all like that?
Spanish Moss
I tend to be more interested in the character development than the mystery itself. I was a big Elizabeth George fan for a long time, until she started turning the series into a Lynley vehicle. Barbara Havers had always been my favorite character. Haven’t read one in years.
Character development is one of the reasons that I love Dennis Lehane. Plus I live in MA and enjoy the local references (most of his books are set in the Boston area). I just finished his latest, “Small Mercies”, set in South Boston during the busing protests in the seventies. Excellent.
Miss Bianca
@Tehanu: Ooh, that Fools Guild mystery series sounds intriguing…just ordered one from the library, The Lark’s Lament. Is that the first one?
Narya
@Karen S.: they get a little formulaic in the middle, but when that happens in any series I just take a break.
Also: Joan Hess had a fun series.
kalakal
Not Crime at all, or not necessarily, but for me one of the pleasures of many SF and Fantasy books is the mystery of the world itself. Where a lot of the fun is working out how the ‘world’ works, whether it be the physics, the society, biology, technology etc, etc.
Miss Bianca
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I’ve read a couple of McKinty’s and liked them – I have a special thing for anything set in Belfast – and I had heard that story about him, possibly from you in the first place!
pajaro
I like mysteries that tell me about the places, as well as the plots.
some of my favorites for several years: Tana French (Ireland)
Laura Lipman (Baltimore)
Narya
@Spanish Moss: you want to go back to the Elizabeth George series; I like where Havers has gone.
Spanish Moss
@Narya: Really? How exciting, I will definitely take a look again. Thanks!
CaseyL
@Lethe: I read some of those! I also saw a movie that was based on one of them. Enjoyed the books and the movie.
The funny thing was, I thought the books’ plots would be mysteries solved by john Dee, court mystic/astrologer/adviser to Queen Elizabeth I.
So imagine my surprise when I crack the book and it takes place in Imperial China even longer ago. Took me a little while to adjust; I kept thinking the Imperial China setting was a prologue involving one of John Dee’s ancestors. Or he’d turn out to be a time traveling mystic.
Anyway
I stopped reading mysteries a few years ago, didn’t enjoy them anymore. I’ve tried reading the odd one here and there — recently read one of the Thursday Murder Club series but was meh. My book club reads the Tana French series and I didn’t care for the last two…
Back in the day I enjoyed the series by Van de wetering set in Amsterdam — there were others that I can’t remember. Oh oh I like the Slough House series by Mick Herron…
Dorothy A. Winsor
@CaseyL: That’s hilarious.
Betty
@JPL: I just started on the Gamache series. Just finished number three, and I’m hooked. I want the food!
Narya
@Betty: I just got the third one! (Ebook from the library)
second one was a little disappointing in that I knew right away who done it. But I like the characters and food!
Auntie Anne
For historical mystery lovers, I’ve been enjoying Andrew Taylor’s Marwood and Lovett series set in London post-1666. The first one is The Ashes of London.
Also want to put in a good word for Qui Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen series, set in Communist China, if you want to experience another culture and place.
Steeplejack
@mvr:
Thanks.
Nelle
@Pete Downunder: I’m a big fan of Arthur Upfield. I don’t often find anyone who has read them. I picked up a number of used copies a number of years ago and have hung onto them through many of my moves.
J.
Cozy mystery fan and writer here. In addition to recommending my Sanibel Island Mysteries and Something’s Cooking in Chianti, I recommend the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear (historical cozy), the Electra McDonnell series by Ashley Weaver (another historical), and the Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz, which may not technically be cozy mysteries, but are oh so fun.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I liked Stuart Kominsky’s Inspector Rostnikov series set in the Soviet Union. Some of the most interesting parts were Rostnikov coping with shortages etc. I remember him fixing the plumbing in his apartment.
Narya
Oh! Also, Eliot Pattison’s Inspector Shan series, set in Tibet, is awesome.
J.
Dorothy A. Winsor: Cozies are supposed to have no graphic violence or sex but can have tension. 😊
Steeplejack
@J.:
Why do you think the Maisie Dobbs novels are “cozy”? I haven’t read one in a while, but I didn’t think of them as cozy, just historical.
Anyway
@kalakal:
Yes, I like Simon Brett’s style– he has such a variety of protagonists too.
Pete Downunder
@Nelle: I have all of them, but since I live in Australia it was easier to track them down in used book shops.
Nelle
I think I could just list authors…any George Simenon fans here? I was surprised to find that I liked Rowan Atkinson in the 2016 version of Maigret. Any readers of Scandinavian mysteries? Ngaio Marsh?
Steeplejack
@Narya:
Thanks for reminding me of those. I need to check; there probably are some “new” ones since the last ones I read.
There is also a series of novels (by someone else) about a detective in North Korea—Inspector K? something like that—that is pretty good.
I need to make notes, because often I “finish” a series (of books published so far) or get beached in a binge-read and can’t press on at the moment, and then I forget to check back later and pick up where I left off. I’m currently beached in False Value in the Rivers of London series. Binge-read them too quickly and got overloaded. Hmm, at least the Kindle keeps track of the bookkeeping. That’s useful.
mvr
In the same hard boiled genre as the Maltese Falcoln and the Big Sleep, Ross McDonald’s series was really good and pretty topical. His 1973 Sleeping Beauty featured the Santa Barbera oil spill is a major character. Part of what I mean about liking mood and atmosphere in a mystery novel.
Steeplejack
@Nelle:
I thought the Rowan Atkinson Maigret series was quite good. The other Maigret that’s good is the French one from 1991-2004 with Bruno Cremer. That’s available on MHz (stand-alone or the MHz channel on Prime).
I haven’t read any of the novels, though. Are they worth it?
Laura
I like many types of mysteries and thrillers from Sue Grafton to Daniel Silva. I like mysteries that are serious about current issues in the world but also mysteries that are lighthearted and funny. A great example of the latter (especially if you are at all familiar with Long Beach Island in NJ is Chris Grabenstein’s Joe Ceepack series. All eight books have titles that are boardwalk rides or attractions.
mvr
@mvr: 2011 Review essay on that book and the Deepwater Horizon spill at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/black-blood-ross-macdonald-and-the-oil-spill/
J.
@Steeplejack: Cozies can be historical. They just don’t have graphic violence or sex.
Anotherlurker
I am very disappointed that none of you Jackels mentioned Barbara Hambley’s Benjamin January Mysteries.
They are historical mysteries set in 1830s New Orleans. The protagonist is a freeperson of color who was educated as a physician and a classicly trained pianist by the man who purchased his mother as a placee (mistress ). The stories reflect the issues of the time. Slavery, racism and political and social situations.
Great character development!
Give Barbara Hambley’s work a try. You won’t regret it.
Tehanu
@Miss Bianca: No, the first one is Thirteenth Night, which is sort of a sequel to Twelfth Night. My favorite is An Antic Disposition which retells Hamlet in ways you really can’t predict. They’re all good, but just keep in mind that the Fools’ Guild isn’t a real historical thing, more’s the pity.
I also loved Rowan Atkinson as Maigret and started reading some of the books. And Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series is fantastic — the only books I can stand to read about the pre-Civil War South.
Quiltingfool
Janet Evanovich. I don’t think you could call her series featuring Stephanie Plum (an unlikely bounty hunter) mystery, but I loved the characters in the books! Lots of humorous dialogue. The later books in the series aren’t as good as the first five or six books.
prostratedragon
@Nelle: I liked Atkinson as Maigret a lot, too. Who’d have thought?
Auntie Anne
@Anotherlurker: oh yes! Those are terrific.
Steeplejack
@Nelle:
Ngaio Marsh got banged around a bit in the recent “Medium Cool” posts about Sayers and Christie.
I like Scandinavian crime novels. I’m always pushing the Inspector Van Veeteren novels by Håkan Nesser, although I don’t know if they count as “Scandinavian”; as you read them, you realize the country is never specified, but it’s definitely northern European. Kind of a nice touch.
Auntie Anne
@Narya: yes, I love those too.
laura
I just tear through authors and genres because there’s always something about a puzzle. Great suggestions so far. I highly recommend the Doctor Siri Paiboon series by Colin Cotteril- and the audiobook narrator is excellent.
kalakal
@Nelle:
I’m a Simenon fan.
The only Scandanavian ones I’ve read are the Henning Mankell Wallander novels and Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s feeling for snow. I enjoyed those
Nelle
@Steeplejack: Very much so. I found a pile of old ones in a thrift shop in New Zealand and bought the lot of them.
Steeplejack
@J.:
I get that cozies can be historical. But to me there’s more to the definition of a cozy than just “no graphic violence or sex.” I’d go with something like the broader Wikipedia definition: “a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence occur off stage, the detective is an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community.”
Haroldo
I had not heard of the term “cozies” until this evening, but I can certainly tell you who doesn’t write ’em: the Jamses Ellroy and Crumley.
laura
@Steeplejack: I like Scandinavian crime novels. Have you read Irene Huss books by Helene Turston? My favorite is An elderly woman is up no good.
smith
@Nelle: I enjoy reading Simenon’s novels as well, though you sometimes encounter appalling attitudes characteristic of the times they were written. I’ve also read and liked many of Ngaio Marsh’s novels, but with the same qualifications as with Simenon.
As to Scandinavian novels, assuming Iceland is Scandinavian, I really liked the Ari Thor series by Ragnar Jonasson.
mvr
@Haroldo:
Like both in different ways. Crumley is somewhat more humane and I wish he was still alive.
Ellroy doesn’t flinch from really awful stuff and is a hard read, but worth it if you can take it. The stuff is really good but putting readers in the head of a psychopathic killer and racist cops is not something to be taken lightly. (He apparently was once a sympathizer w such views, though not once he started writing unless he has relapsed.) The stories are good. The conspiracy theories brought to life believable.
prostratedragon
I’ve read most of Chandler’s Marlowe novels and stories, maybe all, but can only think if two portrayals of Marlowe in movies that I like, those being Bogart in The Big Sleep* and Mitchum in Farewell My Lovely. I think it’s that they’re not so in-your-face as others, which, aside from my own preference, is how I read Chandler’s writing.
*The plot doesn’t read like as glorious a mess as the movie.
kalakal
one that just occurred to me that’s a bit different are Barry Hughart’s Master Li and Number Ten Ox books.
Set in a fantasy version of ancient China they follow the adventures of Master Li a venerable sage with “a slight flaw in his character” and his sidekick, the immensely strong peasant Number Ten Ox as they solve mysteries. They’re beautifully written, very funny and draw heavily on classical Chinese writing and mythology
Also
I love Elmore Leonard’s books
kalakal
duplicate
Steeplejack
@kalakal:
Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1997) with Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, Jim Broadbent, Tom Wilkinson and Richard Harris is a very good, faithful movie from the book. Not streaming anywhere now, that I can see, alas. Tantalizing trailer.
ETA: YouTube claims to have the whole movie. Might have to pay?
kalakal
@Steeplejack: I saw it many years ago and enjoyed. I then went and read the book and was pleasantly surprised how faithful the film was.
Hmm, must watch it again
mvr
@prostratedragon: Yeah, that plot was a mess. It collapsed two characters into one played by Lauren Bacall (who was fabulous as she was). With the characters distinct the book’s plot works fine. FWIW, the movie is good enough that you almost don’t notice.
I believe that Hammett worked on the movie, but google is not helping me find the reference.
Also, FWIW, much of the dialogue of The Maltese Falcon just comes from Hammett’s book which just goes to show how great it was.
Steeplejack
@laura:
I haven’t read any of the books, but there was (maybe still is) a series of Irene Huss TV movies on MHz.
MHz is a great source in general for “Nordic noir” films and TV.
Haroldo
@mvr:
I’ve long viewed Crumley’s books as “Boys’ Own Adventures,” but with sex, drugs, and guns. And with lots of each. I wish he was still about, too.
kalakal
@mvr: legend has it that neither Howard Hawks, and the writers, Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner* could work out who killed the chauffeur. Chandler was also involved and when asked replied “I don’t know”
*apparently they wrote alternate chapters which can’t have helped
Big Sleep
Tehanu
@kalakal:
Another vote for Barry Hughart’s Master Li and Number Ten Ox books. I wish there were more of them.
mvr
@kalakal: Maybe I’m conflating Hammett and Faulkner. In any case the book worked and the movie works unless you think too much. (Which of course I do.)
kalakal
@mvr: They’re both great. I love the Marlowe books
Craig
@mrmoshpotato: I’ve always felt that Mr. Hardy was a crooked cop. How else do the boys have a sports car, motorcycles, and a speed boat in a boathouse?
BlueGuitarist
From an Anne Laurie comment in December, I learned about Stephen Spotswood’s Parker & Pentecost series, which begins with Fortune Favors the Dead.
I’ll just quote AL:
“a very good re-imagining of Rex Stout’s beloved novels. Will (Willowjean) Parker is a young ex-carney lesbian runaway in 1930s Manhattan who finds herself entangled / employed by Lillian Pentecost, a brilliant, unconventional sleuth physically restricted by multiple sclerosis. Spotswood’s got a good grip on the Stout style, but his main characters are distinct enough that they’re not just imitations. He also expands on the time & the culture sufficiently that readers who didn’t grow up steeped in their history should find them enjoyable.”
Sister Golden Bear
Not a genre per se, but I love Mike McQuay’s, quartet of hard-boiled detective Matthew Swain books (sadly out of print) which is set a cyberpunk setting — although far more amped up than anything William Gibson cooked up. Swain’s dystopian setting is, to quote Gibson, “like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.” It’s like the mutant lovechild of Gibson and pulp writer Jim Thompson, with a nod towards Phillip Marlowe and the Continental Op.
As far as I know McQuay was working independently of the the literary cyberpunk movement at the time, although his work shares many of the same themes. Good pulpy fun, with a Sahara Desert dry commentary on social inequality, mega-corporations (a beta noir of cyberpunk that seems a bit quaintly dated now), and the news media. The quartet really hits it stride by the third novel.
Craig
@prostratedragon: I hated Elliot Gould’s Marlowe. Watched it again, wow, I was okay with it.
Geminid
@kalakal: If you like Elmore Leonard’s books, you might appreciate the western movie The Tall T (1957). It’s an adaptation of Leonard’s short story “The Captives (1955), and stars Randolph Scott as the good guy, and Richard Boone as the very bad guy.
prostratedragon
Tried a couple of times, didn’t like it. And I like both Eliot Gould and Robert Altman in general. Their Marlowe seemed like a disorganized person in that movie, which I think he is not.
Craig
@mvr: Faulkner worked on the script for The Big Sleep.
mvr
@Craig: Yeah, hence my thinking the confusion explains why I thought Hammett did. (Not that I have confirmed that he did not – only that I could not confirm that he did.)
Timill
@Pete Downunder: All the Bony mysteries are available on Kindle in the US.
Cameron
I’m a big fan of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker stories, but they’re really horror in mystery format.
Sister Golden Bear
@mvr: I’ll second both Marlow and the Continental Op series — as well as Hammett’s numerous short stories, mostly featuring the Continental Op.
Chandler was also pretty homophobic — albeit the evidence suggests was a deeply, deeply repressed gay man himself. It does account for uncharacteristically gentle treatment of the dead gay blackmailer and his boyfriend.
Also a fan of the Lew Archer series, which carried the torch into the 60s and 70s. Ross Macdonald’s “multi-generational secrets” gets to be a bit of repetitive toward the end of the series, but it’s one of those things you just need to roll with it. MacDonald’s wife, Margaret Millar, was also an extremely talented novelist in her own right and for a time was the more successful of the two. “The Listening Walls” and “The Beast in View” are both good reads.
Pete Downunder
@Timill: Good to know. My paperbacks are getting old and pretty fragile
Sister Golden Bear
@mvr:
It was actually Chandler and the “Flitcraft Parable” is told by Spade as a seemingly odd digression within “The Maltese Falcon.” The entire story is available here. and there’s a good argument that it actually gets to the heart of the larger story. Even on its own, it’s a great short story in its own right.
Steeplejack
@Sister Golden Bear:
I came to Ross Macdonald later in the series, when the “multi-generational secrets” thing was getting repetitive, as you said. But the books were good, even elegiac in places. But at that point Archer was semi-hard-boiled, at best. I’ve often thought to check out the earlier books to compare the differences.
mvr
@Sister Golden Bear:
Yes to all of that.
Chandler is a kind of guilty pleasure for me. 40 years ago I went through a period of reading biographies of people I admired – Chandler, Woody Guthrie, Hammett, and I forget who else. Hammett stood up the best but not without tarnish. And yet The Long Goodbye is probably my favorite book. I resonate to the theme of loyalty and friendship in that book, even though it is not anyone’s favorite Chandler.
Thanks for the reply. I also know about MacDonald’s connection with Millar and her eminence as a writer. I respect him immensely and think he is in may ways the predecessor to Mosley (though Mosley seems to have been a fanboy of Ross Thomas – also a leading light of similar genres).
kalakal
@Geminid: Thanks, I’ll give it a try, so many films of Leonard’s books are disappointing. Hombre(1967), of his westerns is really good, with Paul Newman as the goodie and Richard Boone as the very bad guy.
mvr
@Sister Golden Bear:
I’m hoping that you meant it was actually Hammett, since Spade was Hammett’s character. But if that is what you meant the rest makes sense.
mvr
@Steeplejack: People (as in Greil Marcus the music critic) like the mid-60s stuff, like The Zebra Striped Hearse. I’ve read them all and they all run together. A little bit too much Freud in some of it, but every book is a creature of its time and they mostly stand up.
Steeplejack
@Sister Golden Bear:
Also wanted to ask if you’ve read the Dave Brandstetter novels by Joseph Hansen. California noir from the ’70s and early ’80s with the protagonist a gay insurance investigator.
NotMax
Nilsson, Who Done It?
;)
Sister Golden Bear
@mvr:
Speaking of good movie adaptions, L.A. Confidential really did magnificent job with a book that I thought was unfilmable due to its scope and denseness. Admittedly, the movie contains only a small faction of James Ellroy’s novel, but it gets the spirit right, and even the one major deviation from the book feels right. The entire “L.A. Quartet” is a great, if sometimes lurid, read.
mvr
@Steeplejack: Those were good too. I once went to a mystery writer’s conference in PDX in the early 80s w Hansen, Hillerman and Heilbrun as the keynotes. Not sure how I got there to attend but they were all interesting. Hansen’s books were the most in my wheelhouse of those three, but I read a bit of each.
Sister Golden Bear
@Steeplejack: I’ve read one, years ago, when I received it as a white elephant gift. I recall I enjoyed it, so I’ll need to go back now and check the rest of the series.
mvr
@Sister Golden Bear: Yes. Definitely. It is kind of a miracle they managed to make that into something short of 4 hours.
Sister Golden Bear
@mvr: Doh, yes I meant Hammett.
mvr
@Sister Golden Bear:
Sort of typo/thinko I make all the time.
Off to bed now but will check thread in the morning (If I remember).
kalakal
@mvr: The BBC did a great radio adaption of Hammet’s comic strip
Secret Agent X-9 in the 90s.
Last time I looked you can hear them on Youtube
Steeplejack
@kalakal:
Get Shorty is the perfect Elmore Leonard movie! Rumor is that John Travolta signed up because he liked the novel. The original writers threw out everything except the title and produced a crap script. Travolta threw a gigantic superstar fit and got all of Leonard’s dialogue put back in. After that you just need some stage directions.
Out of Sight and Jackie Brown are my other two favorite “taken from Elmore Leonard” movies.
Anotherlurker
@Auntie Anne: I knew you are a woman of great intelligence and taste!
kalakal
@Sister Golden Bear: They did an amazing job on LA confidential. They cut out loads and still made it work.
I read an interview with Ellroy who said something like “They left out 11 characters and 4 subplots but it still made sense”
kalakal
@Steeplejack: lol!
All those are pretty good, CatChaser I quite liked too. That’s about it.
I’d love to see a film of LaBrava or Glitz
prostratedragon
@Sister Golden Bear:
@mvr: Oh yes. I read the novel first, and was amazed at how coherent the movie is. Emphasizing the Exley-White antagonism and eliminating most of the Valetine story was definitelt the way to go. Valentine did represent some interesting things not covered by the other two, but their stories meshed with the overall story better, while Valentine’s seemed more like a (considerable) digression.
Steeplejack
@kalakal:
I read all of those Leonard novels in real time when they were coming out. Consistently tight and well done. I was surprised at how few became movies, and then not good ones. Stick with Burt Reynolds, anyone?
As I said above, pretty much all you had to do was transcribe Leonard’s dialogue and not get in the way with the visuals.
Ken
@mvr: @Steeplejack: I detect a future Medium Cool topic: Writers who adapted their own books for the movies, or their own movie scripts into books, and whether that was a good idea.
I will cast one “good idea” vote for Alistair MacLean and Where Eagles Dare, though I’m not sure whether book or movie gets primacy.
Feathers
I’m a fairly omnivorous mystery reader, going through phases of reading different genres. Have had an ongoing love for noir, starting with my fave, Cornell Woolrich. Also the hardboiled, Hammett and Chandler being more to my taste at different times. Also fond of Ross McDonald’s Lew Archer books and John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee
On “cozies,” I think some of the issue is that mystery writing in the US has been deeply gendered. The original hardboiled writers were almost all men. Women wrote books that were tremendously popular, but they were more in the suspense category, even when they were about the solving of a murder. The pre WWII puzzle type stories written in the UK style were called cozy, distinguishing them from the hardboiled style.
In the late 90s, the feminist female PI books became less popular and the highly commercial “cozy” took over. They were kind of Murder She Wrote in book form. It became a sub-genre with fairly strict rules as to what is acceptable content. Someone upthread described them as Hallmark movies. True. Homogeneous communities so that the conflict is interpersonal. The sleuths are bakers or book sellers or decorative gourd artists, so that solving the murder is a side quest.
So cozy as a mystery means two different things. There’s the usage from the 60s through early 90s meaning a story in the Agatha Christie tradition with a small set up suspects, murder motivated by personal resentment of some sort, and resolved at the end, with sex and violence not explicitly described. Today. It’s commercial fiction, written to a formula, intended as a comfort read. And I’m certainly not knocking it. It’s hard to write well. I just read mysteries for the insights they show into the human condition, and I’m not finding them there.
I used to read a lot of historical mysteries, but not as much lately. I would rather read a book written at the time, with the racist and misogyny intact, than a recent book where characters with modern sensibilities are living in a pastiche past.
As for a recommendation, I just finished The Port of London Murders by Josephine Bell from 1938. Unlike most of the mysteries from the period, it’s set among the poor and working class. The author was a doctor (!) and through the story shows the reality of the medical and social services available to the poor at the time. Very good story, gripping suspense and the sort of look into the past I enjoy.
mrmoshpotato
@Craig: Never thought about that as a kid. :)
Brianc91764
No love for the Swedes, Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø?
kalakal
@Steeplejack: Freaky Deaky was pretty awful as was Mr Majestic. Fifty Two Pick Up is quite good in a rather nasty way
Brianc91764
@Brianc91764: oops, Nesbø is Norwegian.
Bill
I like the Amsterdam Cops series for quirky police procedurals, am fond of the Dr Siri series by Colin Cotteril and for descriptive settings the Ross McDonald books are hard to beat in my book.
Ruckus
@Pete Downunder:
I’m not sure I have all of the Nero Wolfe books but I have a bunch of them.
I just finished my new bookcase a month or so ago and while I thought that all my books would easily fit, I had to squeeze them in to get them all to fit. I haven’t done much reading in a while for reasons that escape me, because I used to read 2-4 books a week. On a slow week. I have just over 13 feet of tightly packed books and used to have a library card that looked like it had been run over by a truck it was used so much.
Pete Downunder
@Ruckus: May be a dead thread, but back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was at uni, I had a job in the university library and it warped my brain. Even today all my fiction is shelved alphabetical by author and non-fiction by subject then by author. I don’t have enough books to have justified a card catalog but it would have happened.
Steeplejack
@kalakal:
For me peak Leonard is from Fifty-Two Pickup (1974) to somewhere around Glitz (1985). After that there were some classics—Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Be Cool—but the output was more uneven. I remember not liking Maximum Bob (1991), although I don’t remember why. Still an amazing body of work.
VFX Lurker
Neil Gaiman once wrote a short story called “Murder Mysteries.” It contains two mysteries. One mystery, which takes place in Heaven, gets solved neatly. The second mystery, which takes place on Earth, does not have an easy or comfortable answer for the reader.
eclare
I’m surprised no one mentioned Michael Connelly. I am about three books behind, but he has to be one of the most productive mystery writers of the past few decades.
Craig
@Steeplejack: Fuck Yes! I saw 52 Pickup in the theater with my high school girlfriend. She picked it, maybe cause Ann-Margret. When it gets really squirrelly she was all, Let’s go.
Nope. You picked it. Super creep movie. On the way home she was glad we stuck it out. Highly recommended. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Screenplay by Leonard and a punchup guy.
Steeplejack
@Craig:
I was talking about the novels, but point taken.
Feathers
@eclare: If you like Connelly, I’d recommend Jordan Harper’s latest, Everybody Knows. It’s also set in LA, about a specialist in black arts PR. I was thinking it was like Connelly, and then discovered there was a blurb from him on the front and back covers.
eclare
@Feathers:
Thanks! Will do.
Tehanu
@mvr: The Long Goodbye IS my favorite Chandler. The Robert Altman movie did not do it justice.@prostratedragon:
@kalakal: L.A. Confidential is my favorite American movie, and I really liked the book too, but the movie would have been impossible without the plot being cut down the way it was.
Mendenhall
Iain Piers is good for historical mysteries. “An Instance of the Fingerpost” is set in 17th century England and told in kind of a Roshomon-like narrative. It remains a favorite of mine. Deon Meyer is a good South African mystery writer. A lot of his novels are like classic noir detective novels with a South African cultural twist, but I really like his speculative fiction novel, “Fever,” as well.
Mendenhall
@Mendenhall: Oh, and… John Scalzi’s Lock In series. It’s set in a near-future where a virus leaves millions of people paralyzed but still conscious and alert (“locked in” to their bodies). The protagonist is an FBI agent who has this locked-in syndrome and relies on technology to function in the wider world (and solve the murder). You get basically a police procedural, but with a main character with unique strengths and vulnerabilities (and some interesting world-building, too).
Doug
@kalakal: Master Li and Number Ten Ox are so much fun! I could read the first one again and again and again … and in fact I have. It’s one of about half a dozen books I have to be careful about picking up, if I want to do *anything* else before I have finished it.
Doug
What’s it like to be the protagonist of a mystery series? Everywhere you go, people die. Vacation? Murder. Big social occasion? More murder. Village fête? Very murdery. Spotting the clues and solving the crime when local police are stumped does not exactly win friends either. Mallory Viridian hates it. She’s had years of practice, and a testy relationship with police across North Carolina up to and including the State Bureau of Investigation. Normal people never adjust to murder. It’s debatable whether Mallory falls into the category of “normal,” given the number of premeditated deaths she had been in close proximity to, but her reaction is normal. She tried therapy — during a session the therapist’s wife murdered his secretary in the mistaken belief that they were having an affair. She tried religion — several, in fact.
Mur Lafferty has a partly hilarious look at what it’s like to be an amateur sleuth.
Doug
I also like the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, which Kid One called “the mysteries where nobody dies.” Exactly.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the Russian Sherlock Holmes: Erast Fandorin, in a series of books by Boris Akunin. They start in the late 1870s and follow Fandorin’s exploits through to the Revolution in 1917. Each is a different type of mystery. I wouldn’t necessarily start with the first, The Winter Queen because Akunin was figuring out what he was doing. Instead, start with either The Turkish Gambit or Murder on the Leviathan the second and third (though the third was the second to be translated into English and vice versa, so I always forget their order).
Sandia Blanca
@Ken: Having just spent the weekend in Coventry with author Jodi Taylor and 300 of her devoted fans, I encourage you to check out her “Chronicles of St Mary’s” series (start with the first one, “Just One Damned Thing After Another.”) She combines science fiction, fantasy, history, and humor with some mystery thrown in.
As a bonus, the “JodiWorld” convention also featured another of our faves, the brilliant Jasper Fforde. His “Nursery Crime Division” books are fantasy mysteries well worth your time. It’s been a great weekend.
HeartlandLiberal
I loved Steven Saylor’s historical mysteries set at the time leading up to Caesar and in fact featuring Caesar in several novels. Gordianus The Finder is the protagonist. The series is known as Roma Sub Rosa. He knows Rome’s history inside out, and in fact wrote two historical novels, one about the founding of Rome to the end of the Republic, “Roma,” the other about the empire, “Empire: The Novel of Imperial Rome.”
WereBear
Currently writing a cozy mystery that struggles with identity, so I’ve sent an email :)
JML
I have my own sub-category of mysteries: series where the author knows and describes the city their detective lives and works in so well it feels like a major character. :)
Particular favorites for me are Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski books and Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan novels (Chicago and Baltimore, respectively), and back in the day Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books (Boston) felt like that to me too.
solson
Spencer Quinn – Private eye Bernie and his dog Chet. Stories told from the dogs point of view.
Vicki Delany
I’m a long time BJ lurker and today I’m breaking out to let you know that tomorrow will be the release of my 50th! published book. DEATH KNELLS AND WEDDING BELLS written by me as Eva Gates and published by Crooked Lane Books. I’m having an all day event on Facebook with a lot of mystery and crime writers popping in, of all sub-genres). Here’s the link if anyone’s interested in checking it out. https://www.facebook.com/events/1980687358936106 . My author page is Vicki Delany & Eva Gates.
Vicki Delany
Watergirl, I write cozy mysteries, and I’d be happy to write a post explaining what that is for the group.
kalakal
@Vicki Delany: congratulations!
50 published books is quite the achievement. Will tale a look
Xeny333
Long time lurker here, but the Mel Starr series set in medieval England are fantastic mysteries and I think they’re probably classified as cozy, but you learn a lot about the time period. Highly recommend, especially if you like the Shardlake series.
Steeplejack
@Vicki Delany:
Congratulations! 🥂
Miss Bianca
@Auntie Anne: Oooh, Restoration London, one of my fave raves as a historical setting. I may have to check those out!
I can’t remember, speaking of the Restoration and mysteries, who recommended John Dickson Carr’s The Devil in Velvet a few weeks back. But I got hold of a copy of it recently.
The author is most famous for his ingenious “locked room” mysteries, I believe. This one was completely different – an Oxford Don who’s obsessed with a historical murder makes a deal with the Devil to go back in time to try to prevent it. It’s pretty wild! I enjoyed it, and actually ordered one of the source books he cites, on the art of swordsmanship – waiting to get it through Interlibrary Loan from the Air Force Academy, of all places. This wonderful world
ETA: “Marwood” and “Lovett” are names right of Restoration comedy, by the way – really, literally, they are. But I bet you already knew that. ; )
Miss Bianca
@Tehanu: OMG – there’s a Thirteenth Night out there? I’ve been planning to do a Twelfth Night parody with my theater troupe called Thirteenth Night – Malvolio’s Revenge. Sounds like this author may have assayed it already!
Miss Bianca
@JML: Also, I do seem to be chiming in a lot at the end of the thread – but, for a female detective in the hard-boiled genre, it’s hard to beat the V.I. Warshawski series by Sara Paretsky. Maybe it’s just because I was living in Chicago at the time they started coming out, but I’ve always had a soft spot for V.I.
Granted, her tendency to get amazingly beaten up every novel and then somehow spring back (with the help of her doctor friend, Lotty Herschel) does have a touch of the magical realist about it. ; )
JML
@Miss Bianca: Yeah, I’m with you on VI. Huge fan of that series (I have them all) and Paretsky seems like a really cool person too.
Chris
@cope:
Just wanted to signal-boost this, because graduating college just in time for the Great Recession and barely scraping by for years left me with a lifelong love of heist stories (the richer the target, the better).
I remember when I discovered that I had lots of time on my hands between job applications and interviews and Wikisource had lots of stuff in the public domain. And I read quite a bit of Sherlock Holmes that way, and that was cool. But then I started reading Arsene Lupin, his gentleman-thief/across-the-English-Channel counterpart, and that was really cool. I had a lot more fun reading about how the latest useless toff was going to lose his jewelry than I did reading about the detective figuring out how it was done.
WaterGirl
@Xeny333: Just saw this comment and released it from moderation. Now that I have done that for your first comment, your future comments will show up for everyone right away.
Welcome!
Hagsrus
I don’t think anyone has mentioned three of my favorites:
Stuart MacBride – Police in Aberdeen, very antithesis of cozy!
Sara Caudwell – four London barristers, amazingly elegant prose, narrator’s gender never specified.
A.J. Orde /B.J. Oliphant: pseuds of the late Sheri Tepper. Despite her regrettable misapprehension about the function of the ACLU I love these and re-read them constantly, especially the Shirley McClintock series. Unfortunately only available in dead tree.
Feathers
@Hagsrus: The Sarah Caudwell books are getting reissues! I really hope more people discover them.
@kalakal: I saw Cat Chaser in the theater and I remember getting very confused. And I really enjoy noirs and neo-noirs. The library has it. It’s been interesting to revisit the films of my youth. Opinions can be very different. Never read the book. Will have to check it out as well.
cursorial
Jar City, by Arnaldur Idridason, was an unusual mystery plot and a really well developed milieu – I definitely felt immersed in Icelandic society while reading it. I’ve read a few of the sequels and enjoyed them, but that first one really felt like you were unlocking the mystery and the social dynamics alongside each other.
billcinsd
@mvr: You might try Phoebe Atwood Taylor/Alice Tilton. These are the same person writing under her real name (PAT) and a pseudonym (AT). The PAT mysteries are mostly about The Codfish Sherlock, Asey Mayo who sleuths out on Cape Cod. They are mostly set in the 1930s and 40s and are more straight ahead mysteries with some humor.
AT is the author of the Leonidas Witherall mysteries. He looks like Shakespeare (sufficiently that many people call him Bill). Eventually he inherits a Boys School in Dalton, MA. These mysteries are more on the wacky side than the Asey Mayo Mysteries, but were made into a radio serial
billcinsd
@J.: The Spellman Files books are excellent
billcinsd
@Sandia Blanca: Both Jodi Taylor and Jasper Fforde are wonderful writers to me
Tehanu
@Miss Bianca: Yes, that’s more or less what Alan Gordon’s Thirteenth Night is about!
And of course, Sara Paretsky is so brilliant. While I’m at it, I forgot to mention the Dame Frevisse mysteries by Margaret Frazer. They’re just as good as Brother Cadfael and way better than most of the other medieval-setting mysteries I’ve read.
@Hagsrus: Another vote here (late, I know) for the A.J. Orde / B.J. Oliphant mysteries — not to mention ALL of Sherri S. Tepper’s other books!
Hazmat
@Nelle: This is an old thread and I don’t know if you’ll see this reply, but I love the Maigret books. Caveat, I’m working my way through all of them and there are a few here and there where Simenon is phoning it in, but overall, wow. I love Dorothy Sayers and tried a bunch of writers people recommend if you like her, but he’s the only one who writes as well IMO. The Bruno Cremer series on MHZ is fabulous and I think gets better after the first season. There are a couple of films with Jean Gabin that are very good. And we are now watching the old, Simenon-approved Rupert Davies BBC series which is surprisingly well done, although we had to order a DVD set to watch it.