Modern Whodunit Authors?

[Myriad]

Apparently Australian crime fiction is now a thing. My wife has been reading them voraciously. Lots of Bush, droughts and empty space.

Are most of the suspects snakes and spiders?

 

[fleabeetle]

Apparently Australian crime fiction is now a thing. My wife has been reading them voraciously. Lots of Bush, droughts and empty space.

I prefer Kerry Greenwood, both the Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman series.

I tried a couple of Phryne Fisher novels: confess to being hard to please, but could not get on with them -- "baled out" fairly early on -- found the heroine unsympathetic and profoundly annoying. Have not tried any featuring Corinna Chapman.

I've read and enjoyed, several of Arthur Upfield's "Bony" mysteries, central character Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte -- mixed-race white / Australian Aboriginal. Somewhat dated, I suppose -- the author died in 1964, in his seventies -- but IMO none the worse for that: the Phryne Fisher ones are set in a period approximately a century before the present day.

One weird thing about the "Bony" novels; the hero -- who comes across as an excellent chap, benign and highly intelligent and a brilliant detective -- is shown as something of a "self-hater": he considers being mixed-race, to be a most terrible and regrettable thing. He's married to a woman who is also mixed-race, and they have kids -- seemingly that makes the status, in this case, acceptable or at least neutral. That presumably makes some kind of sense in "Bony World"; it doesn't make any to me.

 

[catsmate]

Are most of the suspects snakes and spiders?

Not usually, just some of the weapons.

 

[Meadmaker]

Apparently, writing a good whodunit is a lot harder to do than it looks.

I just finished "Forget Me Not", by John Hemmings.

A clear list of suspects. Skullduggery in the background. Several people had motive, means, and opportunity...….and one of them did it.

This one had an interesting twist. When the detective found the clue that made clear who the murderer was, it wasn't anything that had even been mentioned earlier. There was no place where the detective could say, "You see, Gloria always ate Swiss cheese, so that box of Kraft Singles that was mentioned in chapter 3 could not have come from her." None of that tired old, "I didn't realize why that was important" feeling for the reader at the time of the reveal, because the important clue had not yet been shared with the reader.

Nope. The book described a list of suspects, and their motives, and each of them could have put the arsenic in the food, and then the detective saw something and said, "Aha!", but the author didn't let us in on the clue that solved the case until after the murderer was revealed.

For my purposes, which is adapting a cheap novel into a murder mystery dinner, it did have a few interesting elements that could be used. Clandestine relationships and that sort of thing, but in terms of actual puzzle solving, there really wasn't anything. At the point of the reveal, all the information that was available to the reader would have left at least five viable suspects, with no way to distinguish which one actually did it.