In the Mood for a Mystery
I tried to get into Somoza's The Art of Murder and Garcia-Roza's December Heat, but I wasn't in the mood for either. I'd love book recommendations, especially those of the 'locked room' type. According to this article, what I may be looking for is the Grand Rigmarole type. I read and enjoyed almost all stories mentioned under this category. Any recs? Also, is The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes any good? Worth getting? Huh. I've just discovered that the correct term for the kind I like is 'howdunnit'. Can you tell that I don't know the mystery genre very well? Not as well as the romance genre and its sub-genres. :) What's the correct term for a novel that models on a series of literary-based puzzles and literary detection, e.g. investigating through books and papers? I also love mysteries that have a leading present-day protagonist attempting to solve a century-old murder. Good examples would be Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, Kathy Reichs's Death Du Jour, Margaret Cole's Wife of Moon and Colin Dexter's The Wench is Dead. Whatever the correct term is, I'd love book recommendations of this type, please. Especially if it's time-based, e.g. racing against the clock. Romantic suspense novels that contains this type of mystery is very much welcome. :) I'd love romantic capers as well. Think of How to Steal a Million. Recommendations and suggestions welcome. That includes books and films. Thanks. Be good, be bad & be safe.
posted by lost at 8/25/2005 03:17:00 pm
3 Comments:
Wish I could help. I think our mystery tastes are way on the other ends of the spectrum. :-) I'm a cozies person. Mrs. Pollifax, Dorothy Cannell, Shirley Rousseau Murphy, Carole Nelson Douglas...not so much the nitty gritty ones.
8/25/2005 05:45:00 pm
I really enjoyed Haunted Ground and Lake of Sorrows by Erin Hart. Both fall into the category of books with contemporary & old mysteries at once (though the mystery is much older in HG).
8/25/2005 08:43:00 pm
Have you read Sayers yet? 'The Documents in the Case', is as I remember detected through the documents in the case... And Busman's Honeymoon might technically be a locked room murder, except the solution is too straightforward.
My favourite detective writer currently is Laurie R. King - my dad had the Sherlock Holmes books and I read them over and over during my teens, so Holmes in love makes me happy twice over. The last one, Locked Rooms, does deal with a decades old murder, but I wouldn't exactly file it with Dexter's 'Wench' which is the only one of that list I've read.
I think, like Nicole, that our tastes aren't the same - I know I've read various locked room stories, but while I enjoy trying to puzzle them out, they're not books I keep and read again.
8/25/2005 09:30:00 pm
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