“Oh, I would never read a mystery!” If you love crime fiction, you almost certainly have at least one of these in your life. They don’t mean to be snobs or anything, but mysteries? Um, no thanks. Life’s too short, they’ll say, to waste it on such frivolities. In the library, they don’t even know where the mystery section is. They prefer literature to fiction – the classics, or the titles selected by their book group. Their bookbags groan with the dense complexities of My Name is Red, by Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk; A.S. Byatt’s erudite Booker prize-winning Possession; Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, an unassailable classic of the highest order.
Never mind that the three titles mentioned above are murder mystery, romantic suspense, and legal thriller, respectively. Chances are your highbrow friend has read a lot of crime fiction, and they just don’t know it. Are they familiar with such suspense masterpieces as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold? Will the own 
to having read Faulkner’s gripping legal thriller Intruder in the Dust? Perhaps they’re a fan of gritty crime noir such as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, or Frank Norris’ McTeague. Or maybe they prefer detective fiction, such as Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or Graham Swift’s The Light of Day.
Check out this list of crime fiction for people too snobbish to read crime fiction, and then let us know what we’ve missed. And consider trying out some mysteries in your book group as well.
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