There’s hardboiled fiction, which portrays crime and violence unsentimentally, and in which the detective is usually cool, cocky, and flippant, but relatively honest. Then there’s noir fiction, in which the protagonist is usually not a detective at all, but a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator — something like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings [...]
Archive for the ‘Mysteries’ Category
L.A. Confidential
Posted in Bookish films, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mysteries on October 19, 2009 | 5 Comments »
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Mysteries on October 11, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Mikael Blomkvist is in trouble. He’s a Swedish financial journalist, editor of a hard-hitting magazine called Millennium, and he’s being sued for libel: it turns out that the story he published about a wealthy and corrupt financier was false from beginning to end, and he didn’t have a scrap of proof for it. He’ll have [...]
An Expert in Murder
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mysteries on September 13, 2009 | 11 Comments »
I am often wary about new detective novels. Like the little girl who had a little curl, when they are good they are very very good, and when they are bad they are horrid. Give me Dorothy Sayers or Laurie King or Kate Atkinson and I’ll happily read my way through a weekend; give me [...]
The Language of Bees
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mysteries on July 29, 2009 | 7 Comments »
I read The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the first of Laurie King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery novels, in 1995. I remember it fondly: I was in graduate school at the time, and working at a bookstore, and the second book in the series, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, had just come out on the shelves. Paul, one of [...]
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Posted in Fiction, Mysteries on July 13, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Flavia de Luce is no ordinary eleven-year-old. She has an unusual family (two difficult older sisters named Ophelia and Daphne, a distant father, and a mother who died in a mountaineering accident when Flavia was just a baby.) The household staff is peculiar (Mrs. Mullet, who is the worst baker in three counties, and Dogger, [...]
Gone, Baby, Gone (film)
Posted in Bookish films, Contemporary, Fiction, Mysteries on July 6, 2009 | 3 Comments »
I read Dennis Lehane’s mystery-thriller Gone, Baby, Gone back in 2004. I was on something of a Lehane kick that year: I read all four of his Kenzie-Gennaro private eye novels, plus his standalone novel Shutter Island. The books are great — well-written, solidly plotted, with a keen sense of place and an unequalled ear [...]
The Angel’s Game
Posted in Fiction, Mysteries, tagged Review Copy on June 23, 2009 | 15 Comments »
David Martín has been getting by writing penny dreadfuls under an assumed name. It’s a living, but it’s not what you’d call making a name for yourself. He’s lost the love of his life, his mentor is receiving all the accolades for a book he did most of the work on, and he has a brain [...]
The Silver Swan (audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Fiction, Mysteries on May 21, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Last month, I read and enjoyed Christine Falls, the first of the Quirke novels by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville). I was glad to find a work of detective fiction that didn’t withhold the most important clues and that gave me an interesting, but deeply flawed set of central characters. Now, having listened to the [...]
Mystery Mile
Posted in Classics, Fiction, Mysteries on May 5, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Margery Allingham is one of those mystery writers you’re likely to see listed with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers as one of the great writers of the Golden Age of British mysteries. I discovered Allingham and her aristocratic detective, Albert Campion, many years ago when I read two or three of her novels during [...]
Cop Hater (re-read)
Posted in Fiction, Mysteries on April 20, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Cop Hater is the first in Ed McBain’s long, long series of police procedurals about the 87th Precinct. There were, in the end, over fifty of them, plus a smattering of short stories, all of them taking place in the great imaginary city of Isola. McBain started writing them in the 1950s, sometimes writing two [...]
