Once again, the Edgar Awards are upon us—that august night of crime and mystery when honors are bestowed, traditions celebrated, and champions of the genre feted. This Thursday, authors, editors, and crime and mystery professionals will gather in the banquet hall of the New York City Grand Hyatt Hotel to hear the winners announced, and to toast those who have dedicated their lives to crime and mystery, just as the Mystery Writers of America have done for decades.
Ahead of the ceremony, we caught up with 20+ Edgar nominees, including the nominees for this year’s inaugural Sue Grafton Award. We’ve organized their responses into a roundtable discussion on the state of mystery and crime fiction. Because there were an enormous number of highly entertaining and thoughtful responses from the authors, we split the discussion into two parts (You can read Part 2 here). In Part I of the roundtable, writers and editors discuss what exactly is a crime novel, the most pressing issues in the genre today, how to build a career as a crime writer, and the best gateway drugs for mystery. Some responses have been edited for clarity or length. You can view a complete list of the nominees here.
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HOW DO YOU DEFINE A “CRIME” NOVEL?
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Lawrence Osborne (nominated for Best Novel – Only to Sleep): I would say the crime novel is any that explores the eternal criminal element in human nature. It is, therefore, not a narrow genre of any kind. “The Brothers Karamazov” is a crime novel. So is “Brighton Rock.”
Linda Landrigan (nominated for Ellery Queen Award – editor-in-chief of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine): This question has direct relevance to the character of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and we purposely define the genre broadly because we want every issue to offer a strong variety of reading experiences. So from our perspective, crime fiction is any story that involves a crime or a threat of one.
Lori Rader-Day (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Under a Dark Sky): A novel with a crime in it. Crime novels contain multitudes.
Victoria Thompson (nominated for the Sue Grafton Award – City of Secrets): I think the answer to this question used to be different, because books used to be classified much more strictly than they are now. This was because books had to fit neatly into the categories listed on bookstore shelves, so “crime novels” used to be either straight mysteries (a whodunnit with a sleuth and clear suspects and a final resolution) or thrillers (with a known villain whom the protagonist is trying to stop before he can perpetrate whatever evil he has in mind). With the development of online booksellers, books don’t need to be classified as strictly anymore. We’re now seeing exciting mysteries called “thrillers” by the marketing department because thrillers appeal more or whatever. Although I’m known as a classic mystery writer, my new Counterfeit Lady series isn’t actually a mystery at all, or a thriller either, for that matter. It is, I have decided, a caper, in which my con artist heroine must do something illegal in order to get justice for someone who can’t get it any other way. Are crimes committed? Indeed, but we already know perfectly well who committed them, so no mystery there! Are they exciting? Sure, but they aren’t thrillers with some dastardly villain trying to perpetrate some dastardly evil. So they don’t fit any standard category. Thank heaven for the “crime novel” label, which covers everything that doesn’t have a neat category. That’s where they fit.
Leslie Klinger (nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s): My definition has become very expansive: If there’s a crime (or a plan for a crime), it’s a crime novel!
Nova Jacobs (nominated for Best First Novel by an American Author – The Last Equation of Isaac Severy): Someone somewhere does something they oughtn’t and covers it up…? From there things probably get pretty subjective. What makes for a solid crime narrative often just makes for good dramatic tension: instilling in the reader the need to uncover, to find out. Part of the fun of writing and reading crime is that it’s so inclusive of other genres.
“What great novel is NOT a crime novel? So many—maybe almost all—celebrated novels include at least one crime…—Debra Jo Immergut”
Debra Jo Immergut (nominated for Best First Novel by an American Author – The Captives): I want to turn this around: What great novel is NOT a crime novel? So many—maybe almost all—celebrated novels include at least one crime: Beloved, The Great Gatsby, The Sellout, The Goldfinch, The Brothers Karamazov, Sanctuary, The Sympathizer, Sing Unburied Sing, Lolita. And of course, LeCarre, Atwood, King, Lehane, Highsmith. And that’s just off the top of my head. This is one of the reasons I struggle with genre definitions. For me, there are two categories: worth reading, and not.
Jacqueline Winspear (nominated for Sue Grafton Memorial Award – To Die But Once):This is an interesting question as I don’t think of myself as a “crime” writer, but as a writer of mysteries, and there is a real distinction there. “Crime” to me is limiting – but “mystery” offers so many more opportunities for the writer, representing an archetypal journey through chaos to resolution.
Mariah Fredericks (nominated for Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award – A Death of No Importance): “Uhm, someone does something bad and someone tries to hold them accountable.” That’s not very erudite, is it? I think the essential tension of a crime novel is between individual will and the social order. Someone says, The rules of this society do not work for me, I’m going to ignore them because I really need to kill so-and-so or I want such-and-such. As a reader, I like when I’m asked to take a side. Do I want the criminal or society to win? Do I feel threatened if the criminal wins or do I feel society’s too restrictive in this case?
Mike Lawson (nominated for Best Novel – House Witness):You know, when I was first published, I never gave much thought to the genre of the books I was writing, but I soon learned that everyone else—publishers, bookstores, reviewers—wanted to put them in a box. Mysteries. Thrillers. Political thrillers. Legal thrillers. My book that was nominated for the Edgar, House Witness, has been called a legal thriller when in general my books are lumped into the political thriller category. I suppose the boxes are necessary—a bookstore has to decide on what shelf a book should go—but I’ve always disliked the boxes as they sometimes drive readers away. In my case, I’ve heard people say: “I don’t usually read political thrillers but . . .” Anyway, crime novel may be a better box than all the others because it includes all the various mystery/thriller genres. To finally answer your question, I guess any novel that revolves around a crime can be considered a crime novel.
Robert W. Fieseler (nominated for Best Fact Crime – Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation): I think all works in the crime genre operate in the space of violation. They present a violation of a seemingly unbreakable human norm, moral or legal or otherwise, and then attempt to square that violation with a world we thought we knew before. However we organized reality in our minds, as human beings, that previous picture did not anticipate what happened or happens as the reality of a story unfolds in a book.
We experience the shock, devastation and grief of an incomprehensible incident that fractures our understanding of what is true, what is real and what is good. The story then attempts to repair that break, to reconcile that violation with a new and bigger world built from the shards of the old. If the book succeeds, we gain a more realistic picture of who we are and what we are, as human beings.
So for me, crime lit is not so much about justice or solving the caper. It’s also not so much about resolution. I wrote a book about a horrifically true event, a notoriously unsolved arson fire at a gay bar in 1973 New Orleans. It was the deadliest mass killing of queer Americans until the 2016 massacre at Pulse in Orlando. The chief arson suspect was an internally conflicted gay man who’d been ejected from the bar screaming “I’m gonna burn you all out” minutes before flames erupted. 29 people burned to death instantly. Three more were doomed to agonizing deaths in a hospital burn ward, and the police investigation lacked motivation, to say the least, in an era when homosexuality was still defined as a crime and diagnosed as a psychiatric illness.
The violations were so manifold in the Up Stairs Lounge story that they stacked like chairs, one upon the next. Here they are a sequence:
- A society of men living in secret because of an innate characteristic
- was annihilated in an act of brutality
- and then the memory of those victims became wiped from the slate of history.
My book Tinderbox attempts to square those violations with a new and bigger world that both I, as a gay person, and readers, who inevitably know gay people, can occupy with a sense of battle-scarred dignity and perhaps hope for a better future. The point of telling this story is to shine a light into the crags of our past and not forget. But I am not writing fiction, and nothing in my narrative can restore the dead to life or change the reactions of those who historically scorned the suffering. My book can only do the important work of opening eyes and bearing witness.
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WHAT’S THE MOST PRESSING ISSUE FACING THE MYSTERY WORLD?
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Lori Rader-Day: Diversity, in all ways—own voices, of course but also age. We have to support literacy programs that increase readership generally and mystery readership specifically, and support young crime writers and young crime readers to find their role in our community, or we won’t have one.
Lisa Black: Getting paid. Getting paid properly. Very few writers can actually make a living at it.
Pete Hautman (nominated for Best Juvenile – Otherwood): Self-ghettoization. Too many of us get defensive about whether our genre is “real” literature. Up go the ramparts, and down goes discernment. The sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon once said, “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Same goes for crime fiction. I don’t believe that any genre ought to be defended unreservedly—when we do that (and I have, at times), we separate ourselves from the rest of the literary universe.
Debra Jo Immergut: The constraints of the “crime fiction” label. If I were the all-powerful empress of book publishing, I’d ban genre terminology.
Leslie Klinger: Publishers who don’t take the time or spend the money to develop new writers.
Linda Landrigan: I think, with the contraction of the publishing industry, there’s the potential for the loss of variety in terms of style and subgenre. There are smaller publishers springing up attempting to address this with varying degrees of success—and good luck to them—but it’s important to be mindful that a robust genre requires both breadth and depth.
Catherine Ryan Howard (nominated for Best Novel – The Liar’s Girl): I would love to see the end of “genre” being a dirty word. Here in Ireland, we have a phenomenal number of successful female crime writers whose stellar work often has important things to say about how we live now, and yet their names are never included in any “Best of Irish Writing” lists. They don’t even make the “Best of Irish Women Writers” lists. Because we write in a genre, we’re only allowed to do it in lower-case. On the rare occasion a crime writer is anointed by the literati, she’s immediately promoted out of our ranks with praise like transcends the genre and not just a thriller writer. There is a difference between literary and what we might call genre or commercial fiction, of course there is, but I struggle to see why one is automatically revered and the other so easily dismissed.
“We need to press the boundaries of our genre and write crime fiction novels that have never been experienced before.”—Naomi Hirahara
Naomi Hirahara (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Hiroshima Boy): We need to fight to be more relevant to younger readers. This includes all subgenres—cozies, thrillers, noir, etc. As mystery specialty bookstores as well as chain stores have largely diminished, how are new readers going to find our books? I don’t think discount e-books are the answer in the long run. We need to press the boundaries of our genre and write crime fiction novels that have never been experienced before.
Jacqueline Winspear: I have no idea, but probably not to be limited by being labeled “crime fiction.” Some of the best literary fiction today can be found in the mystery section of a bookstore.
Mike Lawson: It’s fiction, for Christ’s sake. How can there be a pressing issue? Again, seriously, I think the most pressing issue that affects writers in general is the impact of Amazon on the publishing industry. Some of those impacts have been positive but a lot of them have not been.
Sasha Dawn: I think one of the most challenging things about writing crime fiction is providing trust for readers. Some amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary, of course. But the bulk of the action has to be true to life. The trouble, then, comes in writing characters and action with realistic motivations, which are bound to offend someone. It’s a fine line to walk. Write with embellishment, and the tale becomes disconnected and unbelievable. Write it as it might actually happen, and there are risks involved.
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WHICH AUTHORS PAVED THE WAY FOR WHAT YOU WRITE NOW?
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John Lutz (nominated for Best Short Story – “Paranoid Enough for Two” – The Honorable Traitors): Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini invited me to come to New York. They met with me and showed me around. I met an editor and sold my first novel. That makes it sound easy, but it there was a little more to it. Barry is probably better known today as a science fiction writer, but he also wrote crime fiction. He collaborated with Bill on one of the first and still one of the best serial killer thrillers, “The Running of Beasts.” This twisty, ingenious novel influenced me when I wrote my own serial killer books. Bill is the author of one of the longest-running private eye series, about the Nameless Detective. This series influenced my own private eye series, about Nudger and Carver.
Leslie Klinger: In my field, the answer is easy: William S. Baring-Gould, who not only wrote the seminal Annotated Sherlock Holmes but also wrote Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective, the first “biography” of Holmes. I definitely stood upon his shoulders in doing my New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and have slowly evolved my own style of annotation.
Mariah Fredericks: The servant who’s smarter than the master has a million literary cousins. My detective can observe people in private because no one remembers she exists. She’s non-threatening because she has no power. I can trace my interest in that concept back to I, Claudius, Robert Graves’s novel about the Emperor Claudius who survives his murderous family because everyone thinks he’s a fool. Again, a million writers have given us sharp eyed, comedic perspective on New York, but two of my reference points for my series are Edith Wharton and David Handler. I love the intimate, emotional darkness of Minette Walters’s novels, Larry McMurtry’s ability to give everyone in his sprawling casts a moment of humanity. I don’t succeed on the level of any of these writers, but they show me what I strive for.
Lori Rader-Day: Sara Paretsky, of course, and Mary Higgins Clark. I’m also encouraged whenever a thoughtful, beautifully written novel gets attention, the way Lou Berney’s recent books have been, or when someone writes an unexpected character, like Kristen Lepionka’s Roxane Weary or Kellye Garrett’s Day Anderson. I like crime fiction as it is, but I also like when it’s new and fresh.
Naomi Hirahara: Chester Himes certainly opened doors for the types of mysteries I write and it seems like I’m still following him around, discovering in what ways his life has touched mine, decades after he passed away in 1984. I love how he wrote with such pungency about the African American community; there’s so much humor, energy and gravitas in his mysteries. I recently learned that he took care of a Nisei woman’s home in Boyle Heights, adjacent to East Los Angeles, during the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. Our parallel paths have overlapped.
Lawrence Osborne: I think the real answer to that is the writers you read when you are young. For example, I loved Daphne du Maurier and Jean Rhys when I was a teenager, and I think the atmosphere of those books—High Romantic foreboding and stormy gothicism—has passed into my unconscious in some way. Rebecca is a such a wonderfully sinister book. So it depends what you mean by “genre.” I don’t think of puzzle-solving a la Agatha Christie as being essential to crime writing. However, I must admit that I devoured all of Christie when I was young too and I even moved to Istanbul for a while because of her!
Deanna Rayburn (nominated for Best Novel – A Treacherous Curse):The trailblazer for my particular path in crime fiction was Elizabeth Peters. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh all incorporated elements of romance and even married sleuths, but it was Peters who really put that partnership front and center in her mysteries. The ongoing relationship between Amelia Peabody and Emerson is reliable and rock-solid, a perfect foil to the chaos that often whirls around them. Peters was also extremely deft at lightening the horrors of crime with a bit of over-the-top humor, something I particularly enjoy writing.
A.B. Greenfield (nominated for Best Juvenile – Ra the Mighty: Cat Detective):My love of crime novels stretches back to childhood, when I adored mysteries and books about animals. Jean van Leeuwen’s The Great Cheese Conspiracy was one of the rare books where animals were actually the sleuths. (Think Chandler, as channeled by mice.) It stuck with me, in part because it hit my nine-year-old funnybone. Deborah and James Howe’s Bunnicula and Margery Sharp’s Miss Bianca also made a big impression. Much later, I read Elise Broach’s wonderful Masterpiece, in which a cockroach helps solve an art mystery. They all helped give rise to my own detective duo, a pampered cat and a scarab beetle, who solve crimes (and crack jokes) in Ancient Egypt.
Art Taylor (nominated for Best Short Story – “English 398: Fiction Workshop”):Stanley Ellin, a master of the short story and a frequent Edgar winner himself, has set the bar high for all of us in terms of what short fiction should and could be. It’s often been noted how he worked at the pace of about a story a year, and the proof of that careful attention to his art stands out in the fiction he produced: a fullness of character that outsizes the brevity of the fiction, a clockwork efficiency to the plotting, a sly irony revealing itself again and again, and all of it rendered in his exquisitely calibrated prose. I wouldn’t suggest that my own stories are in the same league, not hardly, but I do find myself inspired by his example and his high standards—his elevation of the short form to the highest of arts.
Robert W. Fieseler: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is obviously the standard against which all true crime is measured. Capote virtually invented the idea of the nonfiction novel, of a reported story that curates reality so as to read lyrically and follow the rules of plot. He also blazed a trail by falling prey to all of the moral quandaries of the true crime writer: voyeurism, blood lust, relation to the criminal, sensationalism, hindsight bias, intrusion into private spaces, etc. Capote fell into all of these traps when writing about the murder of a family named Clutter in western Kansas.
“Every true crime writer, I think, becomes complicit in another kind of crime by telling a story…”—Robert W. Fieseler
Every true crime writer, I think, becomes complicit in another kind of crime by telling a story, and that is the crime of publicity, of taking the worst thing that ever happened to people, often an incident over which victims had no choice or chance to avoid, and presenting it as the fulcrum around which their lives spin—or spun, if the incident resulted in death. Everything becomes revealed in the storytelling process, and you’re spilling out people’s secrets onto the page like a bag of groceries.
The cheap narrative facsimile of their pain, presented in book form, can never replace what was already taken. I think Capote understood this responsibility, and the inherent failure in the genre, deeply.
Victor Methos (nominated for Best Novel – A Gambler’s Jury): I’m heavily influenced by the philosophical writers like Albert Camus and Sarte in terms of theme, but in terms of style and substance I love Elmore Leonard and his economy of words, Thomas Harris and his weaving of fascinating psychologies of his characters, and Michael Connelly’s use of simple sentences rather than fluffy language.
My favorite writer of all time is not a crime writer, however: Charles Bukowski. His writing is so real, his characters so full of life and blood, that each book feels like reading an autobiography, which is something I strive for in my own writing. Though not a crime writer, he does exactly what a good crime writer does: shows us aspects of society we don’t see in everyday life.
And of course, To Kill a Mockingbird. I read that book at ten or eleven and knew I would be a lawyer by the end of it.
Mike Lawson: The writers who have had the most influence on me have probably been John D. McDonald, Robert B. Parker, and John Sandford. I wouldn’t say that these writers influenced my writing style in any way. They influenced me in the sense that they all have/had long running series built around a couple of central characters, and because I liked the types of books they wrote, I decided that I, too, wanted to create a series. I’m currently writing the fourteenth book in my DeMarco series and I think the success of the series is in part due to lessons I learned from these fantastic authors.
Jonathan Green (nominated for Best Fact Crime – Sex Money Murder: A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal):I remember reading rock critics like Lester Bangs and feeling amazed at how they used rhythm and vibrancy in their writing. I wanted to apply that immediacy to nonfiction topics where human drama, and stakes of life and death, drove the narrative. But with fact crime, I realized over the years, that the stronger material you have the less you need to adorn it with rococo language. But still, I was greatly moved reading about my musical icons who came to life in a very personal way on the page thanks to writers like Bangs.
Lisa Black (Sue Grafton Memorial Award – Perish):I think my influences have been Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, for their attention to detail, P.D. James for her attention to character, and Alastair MacLean for not taking oneself too seriously. I hope I have incorporated parts of their styles.
Victoria Thompson: All writers of historical mystery owe a debt to Caleb Carr. He didn’t invent the historical mystery, but he put it on the New York Times bestseller list, which helped create a larger audience for it. Not everyone who read The Alienist became a dedicated fan of historical mysteries, but enough people did that publishers took notice and began publishing more of them. Two years after The Alienist came out, my publisher decided they needed a historical mystery series set in turn of the century New York City (time period and setting of guess which book!) and asked my agent if she had any clients who could write it. I was fortunate enough to get that gig, and this opportunity became the Gaslight Mystery Series, now 22 books and counting.
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WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU PASS ON TO WRITERS JUST STARTING OUT?
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Michaeley O’Brien: The only way to be a writer – in any genre – is to write. All you need is a pen. Or a keyboard. You can be an expert on the things others have written, you can pontificate for hours in cafes with like-minded friends, but unless you’re putting in the hard, lonely slog of sitting at your desk actually writing (and unless that hard, lonely slog is the best part!) then you actually don’t want to be a writer, you want to be a famous writer, and that’s different.
A.B. Greenfield: Readers may come for the crime, but they stay for the characters, so spend as much time developing your characters as your plot.
Alex Perry (Best Fact Crime – The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on the World’s Most Powerful Mafia):Real life is better.
Leslie Klinger: As a nonfiction writer, my advice is: Find a subject that you’re passionate about and then dive in!
Lori Rader-Day: Join the writing associations. Yes, now before you have a book done (and yes you can—look up the membership information) and before you have an agent. Now is when you need the most help, when it’s important to invest in yourself and your dream. If you join and throw yourself into the community, you’ll have the support and models you need to know what happens next and how to get there. This has been an unpaid advertisement for Sisters in Crime.
Nancy Novick (Recipient of the 2019 Robert L. Fish Award): Be open to all different approaches and try not to be too concerned with what’s currently popular. I believe there’s an audience for just about every type of crime fiction. It’s impossible to know what will “catch on” next. WIll it be Nordic noir? Novels with “girl” in the title? Look for a way in that you enjoy; I was happily surprised to find how much fun it is to blend humor with suspense.
Linda Landrigan: Don’t ignore the short story. There’s a lot of emphasis on novels these days, but short stories have a long and important history within the genre. They are well worth your time as both a reader and a writer.
Art Taylor: Respect the traditions of the genre, but don’t write with too much of an eye toward conventions, formulas, or trends. To my mind, the best fiction shows an awareness of the genre’s long and distinguished history but also builds on the author’s own interests and inventiveness. Find who inspires you, sure, and follow their lead, the directions they point you in, but also realize that you need to find your own way as well. Be bold. Forge your own path.
Lawrence Osborne: Follow your emotional moods before anything else and don’t get too obsessed with the technicalities of story and plot—they will flow from your emotional engagement with your material.
Victor Methos: If you love it, don’t quit. I wrote for 20 years without being paid a dime: I missed parties, dates, girlfriends, trips, stayed up late every night and woke early the next morning for work, but I didn’t care. I loved it so much that I decided I was going to do it whether I was successful at it or not. There’s some sort of magic in that. When you love something and you do it for love, not for money or fame or to seem brilliant (is there a worse type of writer than the one who thinks they’re brilliant and looks down on others for it?), when you do it for love, the universe just rewards you. But you have to show it you’re serious: you have to earn it. After writing for nothing for 20 years and racking up 3000 to 4000 rejection letters, when I sold that first short story to a magazine, it was the greatest day of my life, and that one day made up for 20 years of rejection.
Robert W. Fieseler: Have a good support system. You will carry the weight of trauma you relate to readers. Your mind will become the crucible, the sieve through which a violation of human decency pours, and many authors do not recognize until too late that they pay a price to become that vessel, that point of distillation and transfer. Remember that you have to be a person, too…Set boundaries around work hours, and, if possible, have a dedicated space where you allow yourself to do all the working and thinking.
If possible, have that place be away from your home and your domesticity. You will need emotional distance and restraint to stop work each day. And your partner will need emotional distance from your writing life, trust me. Although the act of writing itself occurs in isolation, no writer I’ve met has ever completed a book by himself or herself. They had editors. They had friends. They had forgiving bosses. They had lovers who cooked them dinner and hugged them as they wept until they fell asleep.
“Read, read, read. Then read some more.”—Catherine Ryan Howard
Catherine Ryan Howard: Read, read, read. Then read some more. I want to read books by lovers of the genre, by crime fiction writers who are crime fiction fans first. You’re more likely, in my opinion, to get a great book that way because the writer will know what has been done and will not want to repeat or rehash it. Instead, they’ll take the traditional elements and try to build something new, or push the parameters of the genre in a way we haven’t seen before. Those are the kind of books I’m looking for as a reader.
Jacqueline Winspear: Writing advice is writing advice, whatever the literary genre. The key thing is to just write. You can’t wait for the muse to turn up, or light candles waiting—as a professional writer, your job is to write, to create compelling characters and to weave a story that entertains. We are in the entertainment industry, whether we like it or not!
Mike Lawson: Do your research. Get your facts straight. If you get the facts wrong, it jars the reader out of the story and you get emails from people telling you what a dummy you are. (I’ll have to admit that I’ve gotten a few such emails over the years.) Second, if you’re writing a series be really careful about the background you give your main characters. For example, Robert B. Parker made his character, Spenser, a Korean War veteran in his mid-thirties in his first book written in 1973. I’m sure Bob Parker didn’t think when he wrote his first novel that he would write forty Spenser novels, the last one published in 2010, and by then Spenser would have been about 75 years old. So think hard about the possibility of having a long running series and the background you give your main characters and how you want to age those characters.
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WHICH AUTHOR FIRST GOT YOU HOOKED ON CRIME?
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Linda Landrigan: As a kid, my mother and grandfather were always trading Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct books, and I started picking them up too. Then later, in college, I started reading P.D. James’s Dalgliesh mysteries (again, thanks to my mother), and fell in love both with the books and with the character. From there I progressed to the psychological suspense books of Barbara Vine.
Leslie Klinger: Conan Doyle was my gateway drug. After I discovered the Holmes Canon, I plunged into Hammett, Chandler, Sayers, Ross Macdonald, and other great writers’ work.
Dianne Freeman (nominated for Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award – A Lady’s Guide to Etiquette and Murder):The first mysteries I read were by Agatha Christie and my favorites were the Miss Marple novels. I was probably eleven or twelve and I just fell in love with this clever, unassuming older woman who never met a crime she didn’t have to solve. I loved that she managed to do so using her wits, her powers of observation, and her social connections. The first author who hooked me on historical mystery was Anne Perry and her Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series. Finding mysteries set in my favorite historical era felt like I’d hit the jackpot. Again, a character’s social connections played a role in solving the crimes and I knew I’d have to use that as an element in my own books.
Will Hill (nominated for Best Young Adult – After the Fire):George Pelecanos. I read The Big Blowdown when I was 17, immediately inhaled the Nick Stefanos trilogy, and have been a publication day reader for everything he’s written since. That the D.C. Quartet is at least the equal of any series in the history of the genre is the hill I’ll happily die on.
Nova Jacobs: Oh, the ladies of the Golden Age to start. What has kept me hooked as an adult is how much cross-pollination there is. Iris Murdoch, for instance, is not often slotted in the crime category even though many of her novels can be thought of as psychological thrillers that grapple with big moral questions. Highsmith and Nabokov, too, were both early loves in that same Dostoevsky-adjacent vein.
Bradley Harper: That’s easy. Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes. I discovered Holmes the summer I turned thirteen and was never quite the same, since. Of course I loved Sherlock, but I was equally entranced by the Victorian world Doyle recreated in his tales, the swirling fogs and the devious villains. I read the entire canon that summer, and cried when I’d finished the last one, for there were no more. Luckily, several talented authors have refused to let Holmes fade away, and they have added their own work to the Holmesian Universe. I lacked the courage to involve Holmes in my story of Jack the Ripper, but enjoyed placing a young Conan Doyle at the scene fo the crimes, and imagining how he would have reacted. My pulse still quickens when I imagine Holmes crying out, “The game’s afoot!” if you that doesn’t make you want to join the chase, then you should check your own pulse!
John Lutz: Ray Bradbury. I read all his work as a teenager. It was a thrill for me when, much later, I got to meet him at a conference. His speculative fiction is better known today, but he did write some mysteries. Whatever the genre, he produced characters the reader could care about, and fresh, gripping storylines. These are the qualities I admired most in him and tried to emulate in my own crime novels.
Laird Blackwell (nominated for Best Critical/Biographical – Fiction): As a youngster, the first book that carried me into the world of detective fiction was, not surprisingly, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but probably less predictable was Freddy the Detective by Walter Brooks, part of a long series of 35 books about the talking animals on the Bean Family Farm in upstate New York. Not only was Freddy a clever detective but in other books—“Freddy the Politician,” “Freddy the Cowboy,” “Freddy and the Baseball Team for Mars,” “Freddy Goes to the North Pole”—he was shown to be the embodiment (and quite a body it was too!) of the Renaissance Man (or Pig). Through these books I fell in love with reading, pigs, fantasy, detective fiction, and that ideal of eclecticism.
Deanna Rayburn: When I was six or seven, I bought a children’s edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was abridged and illustrated to make it more interesting to kids, but I still remember how thrilling it was to read about “the footprints of a gigantic hound!” It’s still my favorite Holmes story.
Catherine Ryan Howard: I blame Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem which I read under my duvet with a flashlight when I was way too young to be reading books like Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem.
Jacqueline Winspear: Probably PD James. Though I confess, I am not “hooked” on the genre, as much as I admire and respect the genre, and see the many possibilities inherent in writing mystery. It’s not limiting in any way for the writer.
Lisa Black: Phyllis A. Whitney. When I was in grade school I read a ton of her books. Later I moved on to Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen.
Pete Hautman: That’s an easy one! The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew grabbed me when I was about nine years old. Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and Brett Halliday got me through my middle-school years. By college I was all over James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. When I got to Elmore Leonard I knew what I wanted to do.
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WHEN AN ACQUAINTANCE TELLS YOU THEY HAVE A GREAT IDEA FOR A MYSTERY NOVEL, YOU__________?
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Bradley Harper: Run the other way! No. I listen politely. To spend hundreds of hours on a novel requires more than a mild interest in the events you portray. I base my stories on real people and events, and if the idea doesn’t grab me by the lapels (when I wear them), then the story wouldn’t bring out my best. If I think the idea has merit I’ll look into it, but also see what has been written on it before. I have no desire to write the twelfth novel on a particular topic unless I can bring something unique to it.
A.B. Greenfield: ….say, “That’s terrific!” And then I break it to them gently that they will need a lot more than one great idea to write a good crime novel.
Michaeley O’Brien (nominated for Best Television Episode Teleplay – “Episode 1,” Mystery Road): Tell them to write it down. It might be the best idea in the world, but unless it’s on paper it’s not a novel.
Alex Perry: Tell them to start writing. The page will tell you if you have something.
Lisa Unger (nominated for Best Paperback Original – Under My Skin; Best Short Story – “The Sleep Tight Motel”): Oh my gosh! This happens all the time. People email me, wait for me at book signings, chat me up at parties. I’m a naturally polite person, so I always listen. And part of me is always a little curious, because I’m an information junkie and I love a good story. But mainly, people are just looking for permission to tell their own story; they don’t really want you to write it. I’ve never been inspired to write a novel by one of these conversations, but I hope I’ve inspired one or two people to write the story they want to tell.
Jacqueline Winspear: I’d tell them not to talk about it—if you talk about a story, you’re taking away the need to write about it—your words go up into thin air instead of onto the page. Keep the story to yourself and begin writing.
Will Hill: Tell them I’m sure it’s absolutely brilliant, then do whatever it takes—bribery, threats of violence, physically running away—to make sure they don’t tell me about it. Not because I’m a hard-hearted monster who isn’t interested in supporting the creativity of other people, but because I once had to throw out a half-finished novella after someone I didn’t know Tweeted me an almost identical idea. Never again.
Mike Lawson: I typically ignore the idea. For one thing, I’m always working on one or two books and I don’t want anything in my head but those two books while I’m writing them. Second, I don’t want to have to deal with the issue of “stealing” someone’s great idea. I will say however, it was my wife who gave me the idea for one of my books based on an article she read in Vanity Fair about drug testing in third world countries. I’m not too worried about my wife suing me for stealing her idea.
“There’s room for people with great ideas, but you have to do the work yourself.”—Lori Rader-Day
Lori Rader-Day: Tell them they should write it. There’s room for people with great ideas, but you have to do the work yourself. There’s very little money in the business, so you should write the book for other reasons, like self-satisfaction.
Sasha Dawn (nominated for Best Young Adult – Blink): When a casual acquaintance tells me s/he has a great idea for a crime novel, I listen to the great idea. But let’s face it: everyone has “great ideas.” Most of the time, the germ is, at best, a five minute anecdote, something that will never have the substance to carry an entire novel—or maybe it’s a story that’s been told before. But I love talking to people, and I love hearing their stories. Even if the great idea never becomes a novel (or even a short story), it’s always fun to chat. And when their tale comes to a close, I often encourage the story teller to write it. I encourage everyone to write…it’s the composition teacher in me.
Lisa Black: Cringe. Inwardly. But then I listen, because that’s how I’ve gotten some of my plots!
Pete Hautman: Listen politely, excuse myself, then avoid them for the rest of my life.
Deanna Rayburn: Usually I plug my ears and start humming, but in one case I listened and it provided the inspiration for A Dangerous Collaboration, the fourth novel in my current Veronica Speedwell mystery series. I can’t give any of the details or it will spoil the plot, but I did thank the source in the acknowledgments. She was a writer I had just met through mutual friends, and she told me a chilling story over a glass of wine, hoping I would like it because she writes women’s fiction and could never find a use for it!
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ARE YOU MORE CRIMINAL OR DETECTIVE?
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Bradley Harper (nominated for Best First Novel by an American Author – A Knife in the Fog): Definitely detective. I’ve done forensic death investigations in the Army, and find that creating an entire mosaic out of scattered pieces of information to be one of the most enjoyable mental exercises I’ve ever done. I do have to plot like a criminal in my stories, but I’d be a terrible one myself. I lack the coldness to withstand interrogation. The rare times I play poker I warn the others that I do not bluff. Ever. I can’t pull it off. If I shove my chips at you, I have something.
Lisa Black: Definitely detective. I’m boring and staid.
Leslie Klinger: A scholar of both.
Dianne Freeman: More detective. I like a nice complex crime, but I’m much more interested in solving it.
Will Hill: Detective. I’m way too cowardly to be a criminal. And I would not do well in jail.
Deanna Rayburn: Detective, definitely, but then all the best detectives have to be able to think like criminals…
Robert W. Fieseler: Isn’t every great detective almost a criminal, the only difference being that the criminal commits a violation and the detective reconstructs, or recommits, that violation in his or her mind after the fact to assign culpability? But they both make the same mental moves. I mean, both criminal and detective are hunting creatures, animals drawn to violent scenes.
I suppose that makes me more of a detective, the observer of the violent act. I’m certainly not the participant. But the observer bears the burden of seeing what people are like. Not through the words that come out of their mouths or what they purport they believe but through what they do every day to themselves and others. In nonfiction, real lives become stories not of human thoughts but of human choices. And we detectives, or hunters of the record of human choices, have chosen to be different from those who mean ill or prey upon the innocent.
Nancy Novick: In my imagination, I’m more of a criminal. In “real life” my routine is fairly conventional. I’m sure I’m not the first to quote him here, but I like to think of Flaubert’s perspective on writing: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Nova Jacobs: Given that I live in sunny L.A. yet have numerous variations on the trench coat in my closet, the answer’s probably obvious. Of course, crime writers are always a bit of both, as are good detectives. As a child I was always looking for real-life cases to solve, trying to spin mystery and conspiracy out of nothing. When I finally realized that real life, at least my own, was pretty dull on that front, writing mysteries seemed the natural escape.
Michaeley O’Brien: Detective. I have too much Catholic guilt and no poker face. I would confess before I’d even been accused of anything. (But of course that’s the answer a really clever criminal would give…)
Jacqueline Winspear: Not sure how to answer that one—remember, a mystery does not necessarily require a criminal, but It always requires a sleuth. So I’m probably a sleuth, but more likely an observer. Yes, I have to be an observer, independent of the characters.
Mike Lawson: I guess I’d have to say criminal. For one thing, I don’t usually write mysteries and I’m not trying to figure out who did it. I know who did it and I’m trying to catch him or her. The protagonist in my series is also a bit of a criminal himself and it’s usually the personalities of the “bad guys” that make the stories interesting. Who was more fascinating, Hannibal Lector or Clarice Starling?
“I am fascinated by people who transgress. What gives someone that kind of arrogance?”—Mariah Fredericks
Mariah Fredericks: Absolutely a detective. I’m too much of a rule follower to be a criminal; at least I try never to put myself in situations with rules I would find problematic. But I am fascinated by people who transgress. What gives someone that kind of arrogance? What event or neural glitch turned off the empathy switch? How do they process what they did afterwards? I usually credit them with motives and thought processes far more interesting than the average criminal’s. But the psychology of cruelty and selfishness is endlessly interesting to me.
Jonathan Green: After five years hanging out with gangbangers from the south Bronx, nothing defines the criminal life as much as rampant paranoia, mistrust of those closest to you, greed and dishonor, and that’s even as someone calling the shots like an OG (Original Gangsta). Thus, I fully embrace the role of detective and the pursuit of justice and truth.
Sasha Dawn: I am definitely more detective than criminal. First of all, I generally follow the rules, and I get nervous even if I stand in a line I’m not sure I’m qualified to stand in at the airport. Second, I love puzzles, I’m an excellent researcher, and I frequent many amateur sleuthing sites. One case in particular has haunted me since its occurrence: the kidnapping of Michaela Garecht in 1989. So many clues. A witnessed stranger abduction. Yet all these decades later, no one knows what happened to her. I’m certain the answer is hidden somewhere in the volumes of information the police gathered in the early days of the case, and I often wonder if the case would be close, if only the resources were available.
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Check out Part II of our roundtable discussion with the Edgar nominees tomorrow!
