Crime/mystery novels/novelists

I find Cain a rough go; extreme hard-boiled ain't me. And Agatha ain't my style.
Understand that Poe is the Godfather. We've come a long way, but it's my style to sustain respect for Originators (with a capital O).

 

I know I'll get thrown out of the fraternity for saying this, but I enjoyed Mike Lupica's first Peter Finley novel, "Dead Air."

Not in the league with the greats mentioned here, of course, but a fun, quick read.

Seems to me I got a review copy of the second one, though, and didn't care for it that much.

 

He lost me when his Boston Irish hero called his father, "Pap."
Nobody I ever knew, or was related to, called their father that. "Da," maybe. But "Pap"? Unless you're Huckleberry Finn, no.

 

My current favorites:

1. John Sandford.

2. Jonathan Kellerman.

3. Stephen Hunter.

4. James Patterson.

5. Michael Connolly.

6. Andrew Vachss.

Sandford's "Prey" series is terrific. I've torn through more than a couple of them in one sitting. I even tried a couple of them as audiobooks from iTunes, but that's a pricey way to go. After reading just a few, you start to feel you know Lucas Davenport, his cronies, adversaries and the Twin Cities ... and aside from a stopover at the airport, I've never been there. That's a testament to Sandford's storytelling skills.

Kellerman's Alex Delaware has made me appreciate Los Angeles as a setting for crime novels for the first time.

Hunter's former Marine sniper, Bob Lee Swagger, is a compelling character. I'm drawing a blank on the name of the movie, but Mark Wahlberg played Swagger a couple of years ago.

Patterson's Alex Cross has been played several times by Morgan Freeman.

Connolly's Harry Bosch series is a recent discovery for me. I've read two of them, and they've grown on me. Another L.A.-area protagonist.

Vachss is an interesting guy. He is an attorney who represents children and works on child protection cases, has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social services caseworker, a labor organizer and ran a maximum security prison for violent/aggressive youth ... all according to the bio on his Web site. His Burke character is a dark kind of anti-hero of the underground.

So ... yeah, I read a little in this genre.

But I resolved a couple of years ago to read as many of the "classics" as possible. The most recent was Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead."

 

Not a bad list as voted upon by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association

http://www.topmystery.com/booksellers100.html

Nice mixture of American stuff and the English "cozies".

 

Vachss' novels are probably the strangest, darkest things I've ever read. He's one seriously odd dude.

 

Vachss is more social commentary than mystery.

He speaks a truth.

 

Vachss is definitely a dark read. And his personal concerns do show up in the stories more (or at least are easier to spot) than other authors.

He seems like a serious crusader. And that's not all bad.

 

There is a trilogy called Berlin Noir, written by Philip Kerr. It is three novels whose main character is a former cop/private investigator, and the setting is Berlin in three different years: 1936, 1938 and 1947. They sell them in paperback in one volume. They're all good, and the last one is really good -- again, the atmospherics.

 

Oh I agree with that, JR. Le Carre's at the top, and Clancy's at the bottom. Besides his writing, his constant "good guy"--"bad guy" dichotomy is simply spurious.

 

This is a great thread. Lots of stuff I haven't read and a couple of authors I've not heard of.

I had a period of about ten years where mysteries comprised about 50% of my reading.

 

Sure, there's a lot of mediocre and relatively valueless mystery writing out there, but I sometimes think mystery writing gets short shrift. I think there's a lot of great writers out there, many who have been mentioned here, who just happen to write mysteries.