The Midwestern Crime Scene Is Doing Just Fine, You Betcha

This is not a trend article.

An amazing body of crime fiction is coming out of the middle of this country, but I’m not going to try to convince you something new is happening. It’s not new.

“Writers as diverse as Rex Stout, Craig Rice, and Chester Himes started life in Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri,” says Jeffrey Marks, the Ohio-born-and-raised Anthony Award-winning and Edgar Award-nominated writer of biographies on Rice and critic Anthony Boucher. “While the flyover states are typically forgotten in talking about the masters of mystery, some of the best mystery and suspense authors of the 20th century came from the Midwest.”

More examples: Vincent Starrett, Illinois, founded the Baker Street Irregulars. Leigh Brackett, the crime writer and space opera queen most famous for adapting Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, lived in Ohio. Chandler himself was born in Chicago; Los Angeles wants you to forget that. Mabel Seeley, who wrote romantic suspense in the 1930s and ’40s from Minnesota, “even dared to set her books in the Midwest,” Marks says, “one of the few from that era who did.”

Today you’ll find plenty of 21st century authors who happily set their dark tales in the Midwest, which might seem implausible if you’re the type who thinks of the area as the necessary evil between coasts, or doesn’t think of it at all. What could be so villainous about apple-cheeked Midwesterners? Indeed. What could be so villainous about stoic, silent, apple-cheeked people with dirt-floor cellars and no neighbors for miles? About people who live in small towns reminiscent of Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, only with far more weapons on hand? Midwestern people are not necessarily more criminal than most. Terrible things don’t happen here more than other places. The Midwest’s varied landscapes, however, contains so much potential for darkness. Serious potential. Acres and acres of potential. And that’s just the countryside. We also have the mean streets of Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit. Go ahead and look up the crime stats.

But that’s real life, and we’re dealing in fiction.

If the Midwest is a good place to be a crime writer, it’s also a great place to be a crime reader. A few times a year, it’s even better. Plan your visits accordingly to take in the smell of new books at Magna Cum Murder in Indianapolis (October 19-21, 2018), Murder and Mayhem in Milwaukee (November 3, 2018), and Murder and Mayhem in Chicago (March 23, 2019). Does that seem like a large number of annual events? The Midwest is a big place with long winters, which is probably how we can also support so many great independent bookstores, including the Raven Award-winning mystery stores The Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas; Centuries and Sleuths near Chicago; and Once Upon a Crime in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. With the (also Raven-winning) Aunt Agatha’s Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan closing this month, the light is a bit dimmer. But we’ll buck up. We’re made of hardy stock.

And we always have something good to read. Recommendations? We’re accommodating as heck. Just tell us what you like.

Want to curl up with a cuppa and a cozy crime? Cozies skip over the blood and gore of crime fiction to deliver sweeter—but still sinister—stories. Check out Julia Buckley, Lynn Cahoon, Alexia Gordon, Molly MacRae and Carlene O’Connor (all living in Illinois) for stories set in gothic houses, farm-to-table restaurants, in Ireland with and without ghosts, in a Scottish bookshop, in a haunted yarn shop.

Can you handle the grittier stuff? We have our fair portion of private eye stories, like Ellen Hart’s Jane Lawless series, set in Minneapolis; Kristen Lepionka’s Roxane Weary series, set in Columbus, Ohio; Steve Hamilton’s Alex McNight series, set in Michigan (the eleventh in the series, Dead Man Running, is out August 21); or Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski series, set in Chicago (the nineteenth in the series, Shell Game, is out in October).

If you’d rather ride along with badged officers of the law, try Patricia Skalka’s Sheriff Dave Cubiak series, set in Door County, Wisconsin; William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor series, set mostly in northern Minnesota (the seventeenth, Desolation Mountain, is out August 21). Also look out for Jess Montgomery’s The Widows, a historical based on the true story of Ohio’s first female sheriff, coming in January.

If it’s crime from days gone by you want, you’ll find plenty more by checking out David Krugler’s Manhattan Project-era spy stories, written from Wisconsin; Anna Lee Huber’s Lady Darby series, set in 1830s Scotland and written from Indiana; Alex Grecian’s Scotland Yard series, set in Jack the Ripper’s London and written from Kansas; and Victoria Thompson’s turn-of-the-century New York series, written from Illinois. You might also like Danny Gardner’s tales of 1950s mixed-race former cop Elliot Caprice, set in downstate Illinois; Gardner is originally from Illinois.

One of my personal favorite subgenres is small town noir, where the secrets aren’t as secret as you’d like. Julia Keller’s Bell Elkins series fits the bill. It’s set in West Virginia, and the seventh in the series, Bone on Bone, is out August 21. Brian Gruley’s new standalone, Bleak Harbor, looks promising. Out December 1, it’s about a boy with autism kidnapped from his Great Lakes harbor town. Mindy Mejia’s next book, Leave No Trace, is a new-adult-aged thriller set in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota; it’s out September 4. If you like stories about remote spots, you might also like Michael Koryta’s How It Happened. Koryta used his experiences as a southern Indiana reporter to write a story set in…Maine. (We’ll forgive him, because we’re just that nice.)

Looking for something a little more strange? Ben H. Winters wrote his Last Policeman series—about a detective taking on a murder investigation in the face of the end of the world—while living in Indiana. Jess Lourey’s Salem Wiley series features ancient secrets embedded with code. The second in the series, Mercy’s Chase, is out September 8. Lourey writes from Minneapolis. Steve Goble writes “pirate noir” from Ohio; The Devil’s Wind, the second in the series, is out September 11. Julie Hyzy veers from her cozy brand in a big way with her techno-thriller Virtual Sabotage, out in October. She writes from the Chicago area. Andrew Shaffer, writing from Kentucky, just released Hope Never Dies, a noir bromance with Barack Obama and Joe Biden as a crime-solving duo. Laughing at that? Is laughing your thing? Try Jessie Chandler’s Shay O’Hanlon capers or Shaun Harris’s The Hemingway Thief. Chandler writes from Minnesota and Harris from Wisconsin.

Time to get serious. Emily Bleeker’s new domestic thriller, The Waiting Room (August 28), features a protagonist with post-partum depression and a missing infant, while Mary Kubica’s new book, When the Lights Go Out, focuses on a woman who, after years of caretaking her dying mother, begins a new life only to find that she may not be who she thought she was. It’s out September 4. Both Bleeker and Kubica write from Illinois.

We’re also expecting new titles in spring and summer 2019 from Heather Gudenkauf (Iowa), Susanna Calkins (Illinois), and Laura McHugh (Missouri).

So…not a trend, but if you call us that, we’ll just smile. We’re apple-cheeked; we’re adorable. We’ll probably kill you in our next book.