WHODUNIT? BEATS ME.

I'm too stupid to write a mystery novel.

I mean, how do you write a goddamned puzzle?

Even with my Ph.D. and years of schooling, natural curiosity and wide-ranging interests, the idea of thinking backwards from the murder to who and why and how either eluded me or just didn't do much for me.

It's funny, because I started out reading mysteries as if they were candy bars (wait, that doesn't quite...whatever).  And I still read a handful of what might be considered detective novels every year, but the pure and honest mystery--which seems kind of talky and dull--hasn't really grabbed my attention in quite a while. I prefer the practitioners who do things kind of off-kilter, and I don't just mean a sleuth with some cutesy mannerism or tic.  I mean an author who really asks, "So, why does it matter that we figure this all out?"

On the other hand, crime novels--which I take loosely to mean less mystery, more showing you the crime as it happens--satisfy some part of the reader that wishes we could cut loose the bonds of the law and just do something bad, you know?  I certainly don't read crime fiction to find "someone to root for" in the traditional sense.  I mean, it seems these days, TV attempts to make you root for the "bad guy" in order to give them more news to talk about.  Must be working, since they keep doing it no matter how much fake outrage streams from the viewers.

And I certainly don't read it for a "sense of justice that you just don't seem to get in real life." 

Pleeeeease. 

I read crime fiction because it's exciting. And if I get bored to tears, I won't finish it.  Sometimes, I'm bored on the first page.  If you can't make a reader interested in your first fucking page, give it up.

As for mysteries, I salute the people who can make them interesting in these high-tech days of computers and DNA and "cold cases" and...Zzzzzzz.

When I go looking for the bottom line "Why I Read ______", it comes down to this: Cuz it ain't boring.

So, what authors never bore you?

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Comments

[CrimeNerd]

I just finished THE BUTCHER'S GRANDDAUGHTER by MICHAEL LION and it was a pretty good take on the Raymond Chandler PI story, but when it got to the end - where all the events are explained in hindsight for like thirty pages or some shit - I couldn't help thinking about how much cooler it would have been to be with the killers throughout the story instead of the ten-steps-behind detective.

I think for me the most successful mysteries are the ones where the detective or the PI gets in just as much shit as the bad guys. Lehane's Kenzie/Gennaro books always work for me because Kenzie is not above getting his hands REALLY dirty. Pelecanos's Strange/Quinn books were hardly mysteries, just crime novels starring a pair of PIs.

In conclusion, yeah. I'm with you.

[Patti Abbott]

I'm interested in the people committing crimes--not the crimes themselves and not the solution. I am also interested in the people solving the crime-again not the crime itself or the solution. The victims are pretty interesting too. Just give me complex people doing interesting things and I barely need a crime at all. I don't like to name names so I'll leave who does this best to your imagination.

[Bryon Quertermous]

Oh hell, I'm so with you on this but it took me a while. I wrote one after another of first person PI novels that always fell apart when it came to explaining the fucking puzzle.

Now I can't bring myself to read any puzzle mysteries for the time being. The stuff that truly bores me though is "literary" writers trying to "transcend the genre."

[Clea Simon]

I'm with Patti in that I think I'm as interested in the people and their motivations as the crime/puzzle aspect. I think that's why I'll continue to read Donna Leon, for example, even as her crimes become increasingly superfluous to her books