I love mysteries, and am quick to defend them against snobs as being so much more than mere pastimes and puzzles. The style, introspection and character development in many crime novels easily rivals what one sees in mainstream fiction, and they often best historical fiction as a diverting way to explore another culture or era without wading through great deadening swaths of the author’s research. All that, and puzzles too.
Back in the 1920s and 30s, authors dealt fairly with their readers, carefully laying clues in such a way that the astute reader had at least the ghost of a chance of arriving at the solution before the sleuth, or at least to marvel at how the author tricked them during an obligatory re-reading. Elaborate commandments and rules to the game of detection were posited by authorities in the field, and authors who broke the rules might be pilloried by their fans. It was this playful approach to the whodunit that Raymond Chandler roundly criticized in his call for a new American style of crime fiction, less concerned with “hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish” than the desperate acts of real people living and dying on the mean streets.
Chandler notwithstanding, such Golden Age puzzlers as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers remain popular with our patrons, while a new breed of contemporary fair play mysteries invite readers to match wits with their sleuths. Here is a trio of writers who provide armchair detectives with everything they’ll need to solve the crime, except the brains. Read them, and re-read them to get the full pleasure of suddenly noticing all those clues you somehow missed the first time around.
Wanting Sheila Dead is the latest Jane Haddam’s extensive series featuring Armenian-American detective Gregor Demarkian, who returns from his honeymoon to find two murders waiting on his doorstep. Agatha Christie meets Reality TV in this brilliant puzzler.
In Peter Lovesey’s forthcoming Stagestruck, Detective Superintendant Peter Diamond cleverly parses clues to determine who is behind the disfigurement of an international superstarlet. Lovesey’s Peter Diamond series combines contemporary police procedure with the timeless tricks of misdirection and ratiocination.
Set in Quebec, Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache series has won a devoted following south of the border with its artful mixture of brooding psychological suspense and the trappings of the classic whodunnit. Try Bury Your Dead.
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