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Modern Whodunit Authors?

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and Brat Farrar.


I read quite a few books but I don't tend to remember the author's name or even the plot. However, even though I read those two books years ago (decades ago?), I still recall them.

I may try her other books. Thanks for posting the question! :)
 
dudalb said:
No love for the Hard Boiled school of Detectives?

Raymond Chandler
Dashell Hammett
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Chandler and Hammett were the best. Ever. There is no one I've read that could copy their writing. I cut my crime reading teeth on them.
 
Ann Cleeves, straight forward detective stories. She has a series with a recurring detective.

It's what the TV series "Vera" is based on.
 
blutoski said:
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The subgenre (publishers have sub-sub-sub-categories these days) closest to most Christie novels is often referred to as Cozy Mysteries. (wikipedia: Cozy MysteryWP) "...a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community."

There are also some TV series in that subgenre, such as Midsommer Murders and Father Brown.
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Heh; me and my wife had a chuckle on this; Midsomer Murders is chock full of sex and violence. I'm trying to think of the episodes that don't have sex and violence in them.
 
bignickel said:
Heh; me and my wife had a chuckle on this; Midsomer Murders is chock full of sex and violence. I'm trying to think of the episodes that don't have sex and violence in them.
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The Midsomer books are far darker than the TV adaption.
 
What I decided to do was to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, and get access to a whole lot of low budget mystery stories that I could skim, by mostly unknown authors. I figured I didn't really care about the quality of the writing. I just wanted a setting and some clues.

The first book I read was by someone named Dianne Harman.

Terrible book. The genre was what I wanted. A set of clearly identified suspects, each with a motive. And.....no clues, really. Suddenly a reveal. Oh, and it was quite "cozy". It even had the word "cozy" in the subtitle. The featured sleuth was a recently divorced woman that falls in love with a man she meets in chapter 2 when she buys a dog from him, so by the end she has a new house, a new boyfriend, and a new beloved dog. That's about as cozy as it gets, but it was a terrible story and an even worse mystery.

One star on this review. I suppose you get what you pay for. There's a reason that most of the books recommended so far in this thread aren't available on Kindle Unlimited.
 
https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/recommended

Suggest you sign up for the above website. They send an email a day with current deals on ebooks. Whilst there is a lot of crap there is also a lot of good stuff that gets put on sale. I've noticed that when a new book in a series comes often the first book in the series will reduced to 99p. So a great opportunity to see if you may like a series for a very small cost.

Thanks to their emails I've got about 10 Pratchett books for 99p each (I have them in hard copy so didn't want to fork out another tenner to get them as an ebook). Lots of science fiction books from major writes, and Bear, Hamilton, Asher, Clarke and numerous others.
 
A spooky coincidence, the author I recommend above Ann Cleeves first books in her Vera and Shetland series are on offer today 1.99 and 0.99
 
Meadmaker said:
What I decided to do was to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, and get access to a whole lot of low budget mystery stories that I could skim, by mostly unknown authors. I figured I didn't really care about the quality of the writing. I just wanted a setting and some clues.

The first book I read was by someone named Dianne Harman.

Terrible book. The genre was what I wanted. A set of clearly identified suspects, each with a motive. And.....no clues, really. Suddenly a reveal. Oh, and it was quite "cozy". It even had the word "cozy" in the subtitle. The featured sleuth was a recently divorced woman that falls in love with a man she meets in chapter 2 when she buys a dog from him, so by the end she has a new house, a new boyfriend, and a new beloved dog. That's about as cozy as it gets, but it was a terrible story and an even worse mystery.

One star on this review. I suppose you get what you pay for. There's a reason that most of the books recommended so far in this thread aren't available on Kindle Unlimited.
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Hah. That's like the opposite of a John D. MacDonald story: An changing list of potential suspects, none of which quite fit the many clues. Revelations trickle in a bit at a time, but don't reveal much. Cozy only if you think heat, mosquitos, and mud are cozy. The featured sleuth is a married man in a mid life crisis, who falls in love with a woman of ill repute. By the end of the story, his house is burned down, the woman is dead, and his wife, children, and dog have all left him. But he did solve the mystery!
 
There's a contemporary mystery author I like-- Louise Penny. One of her books, The Beautiful Mystery, happens inside a monastery on an island in a lake way out in the wilds of Quebec. The rest of the plot might not be helpful, but the set-up is great!
 
Darat said:
A spooky coincidence, the author I recommend above Ann Cleeves first books in her Vera and Shetland series are on offer today 1.99 and 0.99
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I really like her books, a very skilful writer. Another one is Peter Robinson with his inspector Banks series. Tana French is amazing too, very intricate plots (and afterwards you might wonder about their realism) but impossible to put down. To be honest, Nordic Noir is not a thing for me - often too preachy and these countries really are staid and boring, there seem to be way more fictional murders than real ones... Though Sjöwall and Wahlöö were geniuses, obviously.
 
I don't read much crime fiction, but during the Xmas holidays I read Harlan Coben's Tell No One (goodreads).
I don't remember why, but very early on I got the impression that Coben might be a skeptic, and then towards the end there was this:

"You remember my friend Wendy Petino?"
"Fellow model," I said. "Flaky as a Greek pastry."
Shauna smiled at the description. "She took me to dinner once with her" - she made quote marks with her fingers - "spiritual guru. She claimed that he could read minds and tell the future and all that. He was helping her communicate with her dead mother. Wendy's mother had committed suicide when she was six."
I let her go on, not interrupting with the obvious "what's the point?" Shauna was taking her time here, but I knew that she'd get to it eventually.
"So we finish dinner. The waiter serves us coffee. Wendy's guru - he had some name like Omay - he's staring at me with these bright, inquisitive eyes, you know the type, and he hands me the bit about how he senses - that's how he says it, senses - that maybe I'm a skeptic and that I should speak my mind. You know me. I tell him he's full of **** and I'm tired of him stealing my friend's money. May doesn't get angry, of course, which really pisses me off. Anyway, he hands me a little card and tells me to write anything I want on it - something significant about my life, a date, a lover's initials, whatever I wanted. I check the card. It looks like a normal white card, but I still ask if I can use one of my own. He tells me to suit myself. I take out a business card and flip it over. He hands me a pen or something, what do I know, right? He has no problem with that either. So I write down your name. Just Beck. He takes the card. I'm watching his hand for a switch or whatever, but he just passes the card to Wendy. He tells her to hold it. He grabs my hand. He closes his eyes and starts shaking like he's having a seizure and I swear I feel something course through me. Then Omay opens his eyes and says, "Who's Beck?'"
She sat down on the couch. I did likewise.
"Now, I know people have good sleight of hand and all that, but I was there. I watched him up close. And I almost bought it. Omay had special abilities. Like you said, there was no other explanation. Wendy sat there with this satisfied smile plastered on her face. I couldn't figure it out."
"He did research on you," I said. "He knew about our friendship."
"No offense, but wouldn't he guess I'd put my own son's name or maybe Linda's? How would he know I'd pick you?"
She had a point. "So you're a believer now?"
"Almost, Beck. I said I almost bought it. Ol' Omay was right. I'm a skeptic. Maybe it all pointed to him being psychic, except I knew he wasn't. Because there are no such things as psychics - just like there are no such things as ghosts." She stopped. Not exactly subtle, dear Shauna.
"So I did some research," she went on. "The good thing about being a famous model is that you can call anyone and they'll talk to you. So called this illusionist I'd seen on Broadway a couple of years ago. He heard the story and then he laughed. I said what's so funny. He asked me a question: Did this guru do this after dinner? I was surprised. What the hell could that have to do with it? But I said yes, how did you know? He asked if we had coffee. Again I said yes. Did he take his black? One more time I said yes." Shauna was smiling now. "Do you know how he did it, Beck?"
I shook my head. "No clue."
"When he passed the card to Wendy, it went over his coffee cup. Black coffee, Beck. It reflects like a mirror. That's how he saw what I'd written. It was just a dumb parlor trick. Simple, right? Pass the card over your cup of black coffee and it's like passing it over a mirror. And I almost believed him. You understand What I'm saying here?"
"Sure," I said. "You think I'm as gullible as flaky Wendy."
"Yes and no. See, part of Omay's con is the want, Beck. Wendy falls for it because she wants to believe in all that mumbo-jumbo."
"And I want to believe that Elizabeth s alive?"
"More than any dying man in a desert wants to find an oasis," she said. "But that's not really my point either."
"Then what is it?"
"I learned that just because you can't see any other explanation doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. It just means you can't see it."

(It doesn't really spoil anything about the plot. It's pretty peripheral. It's more of a discussion about the 'philosophy' of solving crimes, but still ...)
 
catsmate said:
Peter Lovesey's Cribb series (Victoria setting) are good. I haven't read the Diamond books.
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I have a great liking for Lovesey's Peter Diamond mysteries. Another author / series of which I'm a fan -- an enthusiasm seemingly shared by few -- is Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple novels (I never miss a chance to put in a "puff" for these). IMO Lovesey's and Dunn's output as above, is of non-gimmicky mysteries where one indeed doesn't know who did it, till that is gradually figured out by the investigators over the course of the book.

The Daisy Dalrymple series, set in England in the early / mid 1920s, is on the "cozy" side: for me, redeemed from sickly-sweet coziness by the author's having prominently in the background the shadow of the recent First World War, which in one way or another has caused bad stuff in the lives of nearly all the characters.
 
Lately I have been reading Michael Connelly, who I believe is a great whodunit author.
 
fleabeetle said:
I have a great liking for Lovesey's Peter Diamond mysteries. Another author / series of which I'm a fan -- an enthusiasm seemingly shared by few -- is Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple novels (I never miss a chance to put in a "puff" for these). IMO Lovesey's and Dunn's output as above, is of non-gimmicky mysteries where one indeed doesn't know who did it, till that is gradually figured out by the investigators over the course of the book.

The Daisy Dalrymple series, set in England in the early / mid 1920s, is on the "cozy" side: for me, redeemed from sickly-sweet coziness by the author's having prominently in the background the shadow of the recent First World War, which in one way or another has caused bad stuff in the lives of nearly all the characters.
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I read one of them, I just try more.
 
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