The GMG Mystery/Suspense/Thriller Club

[Bachtoven]

This is also compelling but a lost less disturbing!

[San Antone]

This thread has gotten me to look around my Kindle to see what other authors I remember liking:

Michael Connelly
Craig Johnson
James Lee Burke
Nic Pizzolatto

[DavidW]

As for Michael Connelly, I like the early novels more than the recent ones. When he switched to cold cases, the novels slowly became dull. It reached a point where I felt like I was just reading about someone carrying on with a routine job. Connelly can't carry cold cases like Val McDermid can.

[Jo498]

I tend to prefer "mystery" to whatever passes for "thrillers". The last such book I just read was fairly bad "Written in Bone" by Simon Beckett. He is incredibly popular in Germany but I am not going to read another book of his. Poor writing (show AND tell all the time, mostly cardboard characters, including the narrator, infodumps as all the author's pathology/forensic details are of course only read up, not rooted in any personal experience), mediocre pacing (300 pages very slow, almost boring but the last 50 or so have unlikely twists and revelations to make one's head spin).

Before that I read 2 of PD James; I had heard that name but never read anything by her, I believe, namely the first of Dalgliesh-Series and the first of only 2 books with a female detective ("female dick" in Rex-Stout-language when this was apparently innocuous). As I wrote in the "reading"-thread, James is a good author (unlike Beckett) but I found the first mentioned (Cover her face) too artificially constructed and implausible.

The other one might not be that more plausible in detail but has much better pacing, more excitement and was also more interesting in a portrait of ca. 1970s Cambridge between tradition and post-1960s liberation or libertinage.

I find the better mysteries often quite interesting as portraits of or at least glimpses into the society of their time. Sure, some are singularly focussed on the mystery but e.g. almost all of Sayers' Lord Peter mysteries touch on important topics of the 1920s, from the shell-shocked veterans (of which Wimsey is one) to women's emancipation, class relations, newish fields of work like advertising etc.
Some of the later Christie books are also interesting here, e.g. "Mrs McGinty is dead" has a rather funny portrayal of early 1950s rural life in Britain.

This is also a reason why I love Van Gulik's "Judge Dee Mysteries". Almost all I know about ancient China comes from these books.

Of the Hillerman series I read only one "The ghostway" (I think). Apparently it didn't fascinate me enough to seek out more but it was also interesting with the special native American setting.

[San Antone]

As for Michael Connelly, I like the early novels more than the recent ones. When he switched to cold cases, the novels slowly became dull. It reached a point where I felt like I was just reading about someone carrying on with a routine job. Connelly can't carry cold cases like Val McDermid can.

I've only read his first three Bosch books.

[DavidW]

I've only read his first three Bosch books.

Now those are top-notch!

[JBS]

I tend to prefer "mystery" to whatever passes for "thrillers". The last such book I just read was fairly bad "Written in Bone" by Simon Beckett. He is incredibly popular in Germany but I am not going to read another book of his. Poor writing (show AND tell all the time, mostly cardboard characters, including the narrator, infodumps as all the author's pathology/forensic details are of course only read up, not rooted in any personal experience), mediocre pacing (300 pages very slow, almost boring but the last 50 or so have unlikely twists and revelations to make one's head spin).

Before that I read 2 of PD James; I had heard that name but never read anything by her, I believe, namely the first of Dalgliesh-Series and the first of only 2 books with a female detective ("female dick" in Rex-Stout-language when this was apparently innocuous). As I wrote in the "reading"-thread, James is a good author (unlike Beckett) but I found the first mentioned (Cover her face) too artificially constructed and implausible.

The other one might not be that more plausible in detail but has much better pacing, more excitement and was also more interesting in a portrait of ca. 1970s Cambridge between tradition and post-1960s liberation or libertinage.

I find the better mysteries often quite interesting as portraits of or at least glimpses into the society of their time. Sure, some are singularly focussed on the mystery but e.g. almost all of Sayers' Lord Peter mysteries touch on important topics of the 1920s, from the shell-shocked veterans (of which Wimsey is one) to women's emancipation, class relations, newish fields of work like advertising etc.
Some of the later Christie books are also interesting here, e.g. "Mrs McGinty is dead" has a rather funny portrayal of early 1950s rural life in Britain.

This is also a reason why I love Van Gulik's "Judge Dee Mysteries". Almost all I know about ancient China comes from these books.

Of the Hillerman series I read only one "The ghostway" (I think). Apparently it didn't fascinate me enough to seek out more but it was also interesting with the special native American setting.

I tried to read one of the Judge Dee novels. Too much of a pastiche/stereotype for me to stomach.
Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds is as much a mystery as a fantasy, and much better in presenting details of Chinese life. The ultimate Chinese novel is Dream of the Red Chamber aka Story of the Stone, but it's not a mystery.

If you like British classic mystery, try the Gervase Fen series, by "Edmund Crispin", the pen name of British musician/composer Bruce Montgomery. (There are some references to music, but not many.) There's more than the usual amount of humor in them, sometimes almost to the point of parody (for instance a character who owns a pet raven but is completely ignorant of Poe's poem).

ETA: I forgot that one of the Fen novels, Swan Song, centers on a production of Die Meistersinger soon after WWII.

[Kalevala]

I've only read his first three Bosch books.

Now those are top-notch!

Which ones are they and when were they published?

K

[Cato]

Coincidentally, I just started A Diary Found at Lynchburg this week. Reading is slow going for me currently, since I now am on a 14-hour work schedule, so I get to it in extremely small bites.

Thank you for the support!   

[DavidW]

Which ones are they and when were they published?

K

The Black Echo, The Black Ice, and The Concrete Blonde. 1992-1994

[Kalevala]

The Black Echo, The Black Ice, and The Concrete Blonde. 1992-1994

Thanks.  I'll look into them.

K

[Jo498]

I tried to read one of the Judge Dee novels. Too much of a pastiche/stereotype for me to stomach.

Van Gulik was a recognized scholar of Chinese who later spent decades in East Asia as a diplomat. He first translated an original 17th century novel about Judge Dee and then began writing his own, mixing in traditional influences.
I don't think you can accuse him of stereotyping in a bad way (stereotypes are obviously part of the genre, also in Western mysteries, like having a "Watson" character who is a bit duller than the average reader). Stereotypes are also usually correct:
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all
 
Van Gulik covers several aspects of Chinese culture (e.g. conflicts of Buddhism vs. Confucianism) and sticks to certain rules of the genre (e.g. all the longer novels have 3 cases that can be parallel or interwoven) and Dee's "team" with eventually 4 very different assistants.

[VonStupp]

Thank you for the support! 

No, no... thank you for the yarn. Storytelling is something I was never good at, so I greatly admire those who can cohere a world of their own to blank paper. Same for composing music and other art which is created from the mind and set on canvas, or staff paper, or some such empty space.

Just finished the first part while walking around the compound this afternoon, and should pick it up next on Thursday.
VS