Mysteries: Cosy, Cats, Capers, Historical, Medical, Procedural and everything in between

[maarsen]

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

The game's afoot!  As part of an observance of 125 years of the NYT Book Review, today there's up a selection of classic crime fiction, the first novels of authors who are still read and admired and influential right now.  It's nice to see that highly entertaining authors who are doing their genre more-than-right are recognized from the gitgo, isn't it?  We might even call these authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and George Simenon  Shakespears of crime and mystery genres.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/books/classic-crime-novels-that-still-thrill-today.html

However, for some reason sketches of the authors' head are all labeled as "Ross MacDonald" -- unless, that is the name of the person who created the sketches? But a google search says not.

 

 

 

I am surprised that someone as well read as you doesn't know the great Canadian mystery writer Ross MacDonald. He wrote the Lew Archer series of mystery novels that are considered some of the best ever written. 

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, maarsen said:

I am surprised that someone as well read as you doesn't know the great Canadian mystery writer Ross MacDonald. He wrote the Lew Archer series of mystery novels that are considered some of the best ever written. 

That's exactly the problem. I do know who Ross MacDonald is.  It's that the NYT put his name under all the sketches of the authors they were profiling, whether Edith Wharton, etc. as "Ross MacDonald" when the books reviewed, with the sketch of the author, were not by Ross MacDonald.  It's just -- weird?????

[maarsen]

I misunderstood. My faith in you is undiminished.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Been going on a bit of an Agatha Christie dive this past couple of months. Just finished The Big Four, which is truly bizarre - Christie's attempt at a tacky spy thriller, with Poirot inserted.

(Funny thing. Though I'm not the sort of reader who can solve her mysteries by in-story clues alone, I am sufficiently on the ball with Christie's use of literary tropes to make a reasonable guess who the murderer is. I'm still patting myself on the back for spotting what was going on in Peril at End House half-way through the book). 

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

The Big Four, which is truly bizarre - Christie's attempt at a tacky spy thriller, with Poirot inserted.

Ya -- there are a couple of others in which Poirot is involved in some large government clandestine investigation - scandal - problem, as the one with the missing plans for a plane, or the one with government bonds as the McGuffin.  They don't work that well on tv either, it feels.

 

Edited October 22, 2021 by Zorral

[maarsen]

On 10/22/2021 at 10:11 AM, The Marquis de Leech said:

Been going on a bit of an Agatha Christie dive this past couple of months. Just finished The Big Four, which is truly bizarre - Christie's attempt at a tacky spy thriller, with Poirot inserted.

(Funny thing. Though I'm not the sort of reader who can solve her mysteries by in-story clues alone, I am sufficiently on the ball with Christie's use of literary tropes to make a reasonable guess who the murderer is. I'm still patting myself on the back for spotting what was going on in Peril at End House half-way through the book). 

I went on an Agatha Christie back in the 70s and being a young lad, i wasn't aware that I was supposed to try and guess the identity of the murderer before the end of the book. I did realize, eventually, that this was the game that one was supposed to do but I found that if I did the enjoyment of the book went way down. Now if the book, or show, is not really grabbing my interest, then I can detach and try to solve the puzzle before the ending. Netflix had The Father Brown mysteries which my wife and I watched and I realized that without fail the nth person introduced at the beginning of the show was always the felon. I am using 'n' as I do not want to give away the number.

[Zorral]

The last, final, never any more after this, le Carré, Silverview, arrived today, along with the Ian Rankin - William McIlvanney collaboration, the prequel to DC Jack Laidlaw series, The Dark Remains: Laidlaw's First Case.  As Big Rain begins again tonight, it's nice to have fiction for the weekend.  

[Zorral]

Spoiler free -- John Le Carré's Silverview.

This is jaw-breakingly good.  So slender, yet the places we go, geographically and chronologically, while still staying home in England.  For much of it one is thinking hard as to what going on and why, asking what are the stakes, even who is who.  IOW, we are seeing lives lived entirely within the clandestine world, where nothing is certain, and all slips, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly, from one condition to another, as to  who is the enemy, who is the friend, even as to which am I – who am I? Yet the reader is pulled along effortlessly by curiosity about the interesting characters while all is tied up seamlessly in the conclusion.

This a wonderful ending to Le Carré's writing career, for those who have admired and enjoyed him throughout.  For newcomers and those who didn’t care much or disliked his work mostly, I wouldn’t recommend.  For myself I am continuing to cogitate and simply admire all of it, and the denouement.  In Silverview, once again Le Carré showed himself to be prescient as to the state of the world, as well as a master writer and story teller. O, he is going to be missed.

[lady narcissa]

On 5/13/2020 at 8:50 AM, john said:

My favourite series...[snip]

Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man and sequels, British Raj India between the wars...

I had to do a search to see if anyone had mentioned this series in this thread and yes, here we are.  This bookstore in northern England that I follow on twitter was just tooting the most recent release in the series and I noticed C.J. Sansom has a quote on the cover for it and while I am never one to buy a book because of such a quote, it did make me go look at the series and I'm curious about it.  Do the books lean more towards crime than mystery?

[Zorral]

Probably crime -- colonial/raj politics.  But it's been a while since I read this, and I have read volumes in other investigative series set in the same milieau, which are crime > politics.

[john]

7 hours ago, lady narcissa said:

I had to do a search to see if anyone had mentioned this series in this thread and yes, here we are.  This bookstore in northern England that I follow on twitter was just tooting the most recent release in the series and I noticed C.J. Sansom has a quote on the cover for it and while I am never one to buy a book because of such a quote, it did make me go look at the series and I'm curious about it.  Do the books lean more towards crime than mystery?

I’m not sure what you mean (might be worth a discussion in itself!).

I’ve read the first two (there seem to be five now) and as far as I recall it was most like a police procedural with the historical elements and the main guy’s personal problems as a background. No idea if that makes it crime or mystery though (am I a noob for thinking those are synonyms? ).

I think the solution was revealed at the end and all that, it wasn’t one of these thriller type books where you get the bad guys perspective. So make of that what you will!

[Zorral]

Sleep Well, My Lady (2021), second book in a series set in Ghana, "An Emma Dian Investigation".  The author has written other series and novels, was born of Ghanaian parents, lives in Pasadena, where he was a physician, before giving it up to be a writer.  His first series, Inspector Darko Dawson, is also set in Ghana.

[Zorral]

Regarding the Abir Mukherjee series discussed above, here's a single paragraph review of the just published installment:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/26/the-best-recent-and-thrillers-review-roundup

 

[Ormond]

Just posted in Fourth Quarter reading about Meet Your Baker by Ellie Alexander. A couple of the librarians at the university I taught at have recommended the "Bakeshop" cozy series this is the first one of to me for a while now, and I found it to be really well done -- one of my favorite "light reads" of the last several years. I loved the atmosphere of Ashland, Oregon, the town it's set in, and the descriptions of the food actually made me hungry. The murder mystery itself was very well done, too.   So I'd recommend this to anyone who likes "cozies". 

[Zorral]

On 11/28/2021 at 3:23 PM, Ormond said:

the descriptions of the food actually made me hungry

Sounds delicious!

Am nearly finished with the second Thursday Murder Club mystery, The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman. So close the end and I still have no idea how it will end, a sign of a most thoughtfully constructed mystery-crime novel.  Enjoying so much that on the subway uptown this morning I was nearly sorry the ride was so smooth and fast, without any delays -- I wanted to keep reading to find out what happens next.

 

[Fragile Bird]

On 12/2/2021 at 6:15 PM, Zorral said:

Sounds delicious!

Am nearly finished with the second Thursday Murder Club mystery, The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman. So close the end and I still have no idea how it will end, a sign of a most thoughtfully constructed mystery-crime novel.  Enjoying so much that on the subway uptown this morning I was nearly sorry the ride was so smooth and fast, without any delays -- I wanted to keep reading to find out what happens next.

 

Oh, thanks, I didn’t realize his second book was out already! I must go see if the library has it.

[Zorral]

16 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Oh, thanks, I didn’t realize his second book was out already! I must go see if the library has it.

An excellent read, filled with twists and turns, and things that happen, things that are found out, and friendships deepening.  Elderly people -- and, importantly, other ages too -- who are anything but saccharine, who have skills, game, agency, goals and objectives, a sense of the comic and a sense of justice, as well as intrepid belief in coloring outside the lines when needed.  You will enjoy this so much.

 

[A wilding]

I have just read The Man Who Died Twice myself.

I definitely enjoyed it, but it left me with a slightly odd feeling. The main plot is a light-hearted and entertaining (if somewhat implausible) romp with some very clever misdirection. But then some of the characterisation is indeed very strong, especially of Joyce, a fully 3 dimensional character who must surely be closely based on Richard Osman's own mother. And also the Ibrahim subplot is much darker in tone then the rest of the book. Somehow these disparate aspects did not quite jell together for me.

[Zorral]

Police cases in Shanghai and Singapore police look rather different than those by cops in the UK or the Us, at least judging by the jacket copy of this installment in the series, yes?  Though we do have poetry writing cops here too, at least in England -- thinking particularly of Dalgleish at the moment.  I want to read this.

Becoming Inspector Chen
An Inspector Chen mystery by Qiu Xiaolong

"Inspector Chen is excluded from a poetry case as he awaits possible disciplinary action, leaving him to reflect on his career . . . but does his past hold a clue to the poetry case?
After a number of grueling cases Chief Inspector Chen is facing mounting pressure from his superiors, many of whom are concerned with where his loyalties lie. What's more, he is excluded from an investigation into an incendiary poem posted on an online forum.

Wracked with self-doubt and facing an anxious wait to discover the fate of his career, Chen is left to reflect on the events that have led to where he is now - from his amateur investigations as a child during the Cultural Revolution, to his very first case on the Shanghai Police Force.

Has fighting for the Chinese people and the morals he believes in put him in conflict with the Party? Why is he being kept away from the new case? As well as his career, is his life now also at risk?"

Chen books in order:

https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/inspector-chen/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiu_Xiaolong

And, ah ha! PW invokes Dalgliesh as well:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7278-9044-3

 

[Zorral]

The Word Is Murder (2017); The Sentence Is Death (2018); A Line To Kill (2021)

O this is good, very good -- Anthony Horowitz has a series, three so far, which is a kind of Watson and Sherlock in the present day, so it's Hawthorne and ... ta-Dah! Horowitz.  This should not work, it should be insufferable at the very least, as Horowitz is portrayed, by himself the writer, as himself, a fabulously successful television writer and writer of novels.  But it isn't like that.  Horowitz the author doesn't say that about himself as character, though Horowitz the characters does refers frequently to his own / Horowitz the author's works, wildly successful television series such as Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders, to not quite as successful novel, The Silk Road (one of his novels featuring Sherlock Holmes), to the wildly successful Alex Rider YA series -- which became also a wildly successful television series.

Equally here are references to detective and crime fiction by many other writers, past and present. 

And that's why this series works, I think. The references to his own and others' fictions and television programs is about what is operationally effective in these works, in terms of character, plot, what audiences want, expect and like in a crime and mystery, whether fiction or ‘true crime’– including interesting locations, or least a milieu which the audience isn’t likely to inhabit itself. An example would be the stews of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. In A Line to Kill, here we are, on Alderney, picturesque but certainly a distance from a reader like myself, whose sense of the Channel Islands, and other islands that are part of the UK in one way or another, has come via fiction such as that by Ann Cleeves's Jimmy Perez and Shetland. The Perez novels are both wildly successful as novels, and as a very successful television series. But even more so for A Line To Kill, for instance, there are references to an older, but also very successful television series, Bergerac, which takes place on Alderney’s neighboring island of Jersey. Then, to convolute even more so (beware writers looking to have fun with their own work!), Bergerac’s title character is played by the young John Nettles, who portrays Chief Inspector Barnaby in the television series Midsomer Murders.How meta can we get?

Beyond even that, Alderney has hundreds of nazi built fortifications and other WWII left overs from the Nazi occupation, including mass grave sites from internment camps, thus character Horowitz thinks of the not as wildly successful television series in the UK, but much more liked in the US, Island At War (in which, let us not forget, how perfectly Lawrence Fox played a callow nazi officer ....).  One of those nazi artifacts plays a role in the plot. 

These observations by the character, Horowitz, are always in the context of what Hawthorn is doing or not doing, or not telling, character Horowitz, etc., and the emotional and professional cost this is to the writer who is supposed to portray this up-and-coming famous, infallible detective. All these contribute to the portrayal of the writer's character as writer, whose job it is to be a writer / novelist, at least of the sort he is. First and foremost, despite whatever joy of inspiration may or may not manifest now again, this is a job of work, and often, not that pleasant.  It's even more of a slog when this latest project is utterly adored by his publishers and readers who want more More MORE of it (see: Agatha Christie and Poirot, or even Doyle and Sherlock).  These days character Horowitz's job is shadowing Private Investigator Hawthorne on a case and then writing it up the case’s investigation as a book targeted to mass audience.  Which is the job that author Horowitz has taken on.

These books are a hoot, their cleverness quite entertaining, and no more taxing to the brain than watching Midsomer Murders, which Horowitz the author made into one of the most successful television programs of all time. Again, here we have a wildly successful set of novels, by Carolyn Graham, turned into a wildly successful television series. 

0I wish to give further credit to Horowitz: these are books I'd recommend to anyone who wants to write genre fiction of any sort.  Horowitz illustrates, without telling us. that one must study, really study the masters, past and present, to know what one is doing, know your genre (as well as a great deal else too, equally necessary) inside and out.

Edited December 27, 2021 by Zorral