Reader XYKADEMIQZ suggested that I talk about the mystery genre books I’m reading, and I’m happy to do that. I’ve been disappointed with my recent findings in the genre, and here’s why.
What do you usually look for in a mystery? Twists and turns and a surprising ending, yes. But the surprise at the end is only valuable if it happens within a plausible story. If the surprise is that the murder inside a locked room was committed by a killer who developed a skill of walking through walls, that will be disappointing to readers.
There must be something in such novels in addition to plot twists. Writers like Ruth Rendell and Sophie Hannah, for example, have a brilliant insight into psychology. Each has a whole series of characters who illustrate different kinds of psychopathology. It’s clear that Hannah, in particular, reads widely in the field to make her characters plausible and fascinating.
Another possibility is to offer an insight into the intricacies of the American legal system. John Lescroart is such an author. His novels are interesting because their characters navigate the complexities of the courts that are realistic. Like Hannah, Lescroart clearly does a mountain of research before writing.
This is a sort of a tacit compact that a mystery author has with the reader. I’ll surprise you, the author says, and I’ll manage to do it without abandoning reality. The snake that bit a young woman in the English countryside in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery was a real snake that the girl’s evil stepfather had brought from India. It wasn’t a magical snake brought over by fairies. Fairies are a different genre.
Unfortunately, the authors of the recent novels I have read in the genre either don’t know or don’t care about its conventions. Jeneva Rose’s The Perfect Marriage and Whiskey Sour by JA Konrath heap one senseless surprise upon another amidst a stock of cartoonishly unrealistic characters. These novels are pure dopamine factories. They don’t offer any insight into the human nature. They give you no questions to ponder. All they give is a succession of dopamine hits.
Clarissa's Blog 
Other than the authors you mentioned, who else would you recommend in the mystery genre?
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There’s also Elizabeth George. Her special thing is that she researches different regions of Great Britain and sets her novels there. She also does a mega mountain of research.
The early work by Richard North Patterson was fantastic but then he went woke.
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” The snake that bit a young woman in the English countryside in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery was a real snake”
Sort of… IIRC he lured with a bowl of milk which would not tempty any snake (it was a common myth at the time) and it responded to a whistle (snakes are deaf). But… yeah, point taken he was working within the bounds of what people thought at the time.
I would also add that I don’t like mysteries that withhold important information. Agatha Christie did that a time or two where the clues the reveal the murder aren’t revealed to the reader until after the killer is exposed….
And, I’d add, mysteries are interesting when they happen within interesting out of the ordinary human settings but are still inhabited by human beings with plausible (if extreme (human motivations and behaviors).
That’s one thing i like about the Maigret novels – you get glimpses of all sorts of weird, marginal characters or social settings that seem plausible and largely presented without judgement. I was disappointed by an adaptation a few years ago of one of his novels that shoehorned feminist talking points which meant changing the relationship between Maigret and some characters in the story in a dumb way.
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Maigret is a great example of this down-to-earth, realistic yet fascinating portrayal of daily life.
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