Tag Archives: Minnesota Crime Wave

Best Mysteries/Thrillers — Fall and Winter Reading List

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I am reading through a list of 15 36 48 books that I believe define the genre I’m writing in, Mystery/thriller.  I’ve attached my list as a separate page.

When I began writing, I didn’t choose a type of fiction or a genre. I just started  telling stories. To my surprise, I found I was writing what is now classified as a Thriller.

Trouble is, the Mystery (subcategory: Suspense, sub category: Thriller) world is huge, particularly since publishing houses discovered calling a book a thriller is a marketing advantage. In a thriller, Hero, frequently an ordinary person, Stack of booksdiscovers a big, bad problem, and we’re off.  My two novels, one complete, one almost so, run that way.

After a couple of years of research on my own (aka stumbling around), I ran into a lively discussion of fifteen great mystery writers at Minnesota Crime Wave. Energized, I made a list and amplified it with suggestions from my writers groups. The list includes mystery, suspense and thriller titles. Most mystery writers produce series (after all, when you’ve created discovered a good character, you have to let him or her live a little), so tried to find the single title in a series that best represents the author, with some outstanding help from the fine folks at the bookstore Once Upon a Crime and Karl Jorgenson, who reads widely and has encyclopedic knowledge of the genre. (See his reviews at Goodreads.)

Most of the authors on my list are famous, established writers.  I’ve added a few less famous writers whose works I’ve admired, including books from members of writers groups I’m in, Tim Mahoney (gangster-era noir) and Carl Brookins (several mystery series).  I did not include mystery categories distant from adult thrillers. That means I left out some fine works of writing group members. The cozy mysteries from Monica Ferris aren’t on the list, nor is Susan Runholt’s YA story, The Mystery of the Third Lucretia. Also missing are Karl Jorgenson’s (oops, John Sandfraud’s) send-up of John Sandford (a short novella) and Kara Jorges’ mostly romance novels. (There’s a fine caper mystery coming soon.)

I’m halfway through my list.  Trouble is, it keeps growing.

To Genre or Not to Genre, That Is the Persistent Question

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Does one (say, an unpublished author) (say, me) try to conform his writing to the model of a genre? If so, what is the model?

Does my Muse care about genre? Of course not.  She admires Ursula LaGuin, who said Museof genre, “I don’t want to live in some gated literary community just to get respect from the ignorant.”

Of course, my Muse can’t be bothered with piddling matters of commerce and the like. She did not mention that LeGuin presumably made her statement after she was published.

On the practical side of things, I get that you have to be able to describe what you’re writing in a few words. Leading a conversation with “My work is really impossible to classify, a unique blend of realism and fantasy leading to a confrontation between …” gets a polite smile and an invented need to be somewhere else. Quickly. Leading with the same description in a query letter? Fugeddaboudit.

It’s Aristotle’s fault, really. He stamped our pedagogy with the need to classify, and it stuck. We like to put things in well-organized cubbyholes. And really, I understand the need. An agent or publisher needs to know where a book fits. A bookseller (remember them?) needs to shelve it. Not tomorrow, not after 50 pages, but now.

MN Crime WaveThat has led me to try to understand, in depth, the thriller genre I’m writing in and its relationship to others close to it. That quest led me to the Minnesota Crime Wave, three crime writers of serious intent and fine reputation. In particular, there’s a series of public TV programs featuring discussions between the Crime Wave (Carl Brookins, Ellen Hart and William Kent Krueger) and often other writers. Episode 13 defined the Thriller genre better than I’ve seen before, and Episode 6 produced an excellent reading list that will occupy the rest of my summer.