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The Amelia Peabody books by Elizabeth Peters seem like they'd fit with what you're looking for.
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Nov 22, 2022 20:00
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Fighting Trousers posted:So I've been on a massive Brother Cadfael kick again. They are the epitome of comfort reads for me, but I'm thinking I want to try out some other historical mysteries. Preferablly relatively cozy - I'm not a fan of the grimdark blood-and-poo poo variety. You might want to try Steve Hockensmith's' Holmes on the Range series, which has a pair of cowboy brothers solving mysteries in the US west in the 1890's.
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Nov 22, 2022 20:07
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Selachian posted:Lindsey Davis's Marcus Didius Falco books are good and there are plenty of them. Those are the ones I wanted to mention, but I've only read about... five of them.
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Nov 22, 2022 22:12
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Oh, and I should throw in a mention for Troy Soos's Mickey Rawlings series, where the detective is a baseball player in the pre-WWI major leagues.
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Nov 22, 2022 22:44
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Also, if you want cozy, they're not historical but the milieu fairly exotic to someone from the North Hemisphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No._1_Ladies%27_Detective_Agency It's a very warm, pleasant read.
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Nov 22, 2022 22:53
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Helpful goons posted:Some great suggestions Excellent! My library save list runneth over.
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Nov 22, 2022 23:49
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Megazver posted:Also, if you want cozy, they're not historical but the milieu fairly exotic to someone from the North Hemisphere: Too bad the plot is suck.
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Nov 23, 2022 08:36
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Too bad the plot is suck. Does it? Most books I've read in the series were about 50% slice-of-life, but I wouldn't call it "plot is suck".
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Nov 23, 2022 11:25
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Megazver posted:Does it? Most books I've read in the series were about 50% slice-of-life, but I wouldn't call it "plot is suck". I only read the one and instead of the detective solving the crime, the crime just kinda solves itself.
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Nov 23, 2022 11:39
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Yes, it's not a whodunnit series. She does the kind of private investigation actual private investigators in real life usually do. The series might not be for you.
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Nov 23, 2022 12:28
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I just read the fourth book by Mary Fitt from Moonstone Press' recent string of reprints, and it was excellent and had a different perspective from what I'm used to. All of her books that I've read so far have been really good, but I think my favorite was Death and the Pleasant Voices. The thing I liked best about it was the excellent psychological description of how the Random Stranger Whose Car Broke Down, Causing Him To Appear At the Scene of the Crime to Be the Audience Surrogate, a young medical student, finds himself randomly and unexpectedly the heir to All The Money as a result of shenanigans, and the immediate unbalancing effect this has on him, in spite of all his efforts to avoid it.
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Dec 4, 2022 19:05
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These seemed appropriate to post here. From comic artist Ahmed Raafat's Twitter; World's Greatest DetectivesTM Can you name them all?
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Jan 20, 2023 14:19
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The_Other posted:These seemed appropriate to post here. From comic artist Ahmed Raafat's Twitter; World's Greatest DetectivesTM Can you name them all? Sure! I'll name them (clockwise from the top) Cat-Man, Señor Del Monte, Knatterton Cosplayer, Vape Hobo, and Hank.
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Jan 20, 2023 14:28
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The_Other posted:These seemed appropriate to post here. From comic artist Ahmed Raafat's Twitter; World's Greatest DetectivesTM Can you name them all? one of these hasn't had nearly a deep enough documented career to stand in the same company as the others. edit: benoit blanc Fate Accomplice fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jan 20, 2023 |
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Jan 20, 2023 16:37
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yeah gently caress batman
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Jan 20, 2023 17:37
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incidentally if you haven't seen all of Columbo, it's all on Tubi for free. I watched all 69 episodes over 2 years with a friend, and it was one of the best TV experiences I've ever had.
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Jan 20, 2023 17:55
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Fate Accomplice posted:one of these hasn't had nearly a deep enough documented career to stand in the same company as the others. Spoiler not helping.
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Jan 20, 2023 19:17
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Fate Accomplice posted:edit: benoit blanc Who the hell is benoit blanc? Also, Megazver posted:yeah gently caress batman
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Jan 20, 2023 19:29
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Knives Out/Glass Onion guy
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Jan 20, 2023 19:30
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anilEhilated posted:Who the hell is benoit blanc? The detective from recent movies Knives Out and Glass Onion 
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Jan 20, 2023 19:30
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If Batman were a real detective then Joker wouldn't keep getting out of prison
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Jan 20, 2023 19:33
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I finally got a chance to listen to a clip of the new recording of Thus Was Adonis Murdered, and wow, I have no idea what's going on there. It sounds like the narrator is trying to convey Professor Tamar's androgyny (which wouldn't even be right because the point of the character isn't that they have an uncommon gender, it's that they have one the reader isn't privy to) by switching back and forth between male and female speech patterns? Or something? I don't know, but it gives me a headache.
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Mar 24, 2023 22:38
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Just finished hard case crime #001, Lawrence Block’s “Grifter’s Game.” Super predictable plot except for an absolute haymaker of an ending I did not see coming at all.
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Apr 8, 2023 00:52
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I just read The Maid by Anita Prose which bills itself as 'like Clue in a hotel' and it won reader awards and is being adapted into a movie. It was real bad. Leaving aside Knox and whatnot (no, you cannot as a reader solve this), the book is basically a worse version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which you may remember from a decade+ ago as being about an autistic boy trying to solve the crime of his neighbour's dog's death. The Maid is also autistic except this word is never mentioned in the book and is treated as quirky rather than an actual issue that maybe she should talk to a real support person for. Reading the blurb and prologue you may assume that being both autistic and a maid the book might actually make use of the concept that she is effectively invisible to hotel guests and also would notice something other people miss. This literally doesn't even happen. Actively disrecommend.
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Apr 13, 2023 11:30
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I read a Dr. Thorndyke novel (maybe "Eye of Horus?) where the entire time I was thinking Oh PLEASE don't let the big twist be that the maid didn't know the victim and therefore the dude she saw could've been anyone but somehow the entire universe except for Thorndyke fails to immediately notice this rather important fact but, welp...
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Apr 13, 2023 11:37
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Fate Accomplice posted:Just finished hard case crime #001, Lawrence Block’s “Grifter’s Game.” That ending is wild and means I’m almost certainly going to reread it at some point.
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Apr 21, 2023 12:48
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Been reading the original Kosuke Kindaichi novels by Seishi Yokomizo, since they've been recently translated by Pushkin Press. There's a specific characterization beat that keeps popping up that I'm really into. Being classic rear end mysteries, there's a lot of focus on mechanics of locked rooms or crime scenes. A woman's corpse found under a giant bell or hanging on a tree, things like that. Those sections don't do a lot for me, but what really works is the conclusion Kindaichi outlines once he's solved the crime scene puzzle: it takes a special kind of bonkers for a murderer to commit so fully to building a murder set-up like this. It helps add layers to picking apart suspects, because the crime scenes themselves are so attention-grabbing, you have to start picking apart who's motive is obsessive enough that they'd feel compelled to build a crime scene like this. Its such a specific level of nuance to nail, but it adds a lot to each book's narrative. The mystery puzzles are just as unusual to imagine in real life as it does within the fiction, so it ends up adding more suspicion to the cast than less. Its a phenomenal touch.
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Jun 19, 2023 22:04
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The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime turns out to have a lot of really good stuff, and it focuses on authors you've probably never heard of instead of the same old guys, which is nice. I'm probably going to check a lot of this stuff that's on Project Gutenberg out, especially the stories about Colonel Clay, who appears to be on-track to swindle the same millionaire in each of twelve different short stories.
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Jul 2, 2023 04:03
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Rand Brittain posted:The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime turns out to have a lot of really good stuff, and it focuses on authors you've probably never heard of instead of the same old guys, which is nice. I'm probably going to check a lot of this stuff that's on Project Gutenberg out, especially the stories about Colonel Clay, who appears to be on-track to swindle the same millionaire in each of twelve different short stories. Lmao gotta check that out. Sounds like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon concept.
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Jul 2, 2023 08:30
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Just finished Martin Cruz Smith's "Polar Star" in two days. I'd forgotten how pleasant it is to read a good thriller, because nowadays crime writers don't have editors (that do their job) and everything is a 300-page book with 400 added pages of poo poo.
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Jul 4, 2023 20:23
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I wound up getting a copy of How Doth the Little Crocodile, an extremely out-of-print title by Anthony and Peter Schaffer, one of whom you may recall as the author of Equus. I'm kind of wishing I hadn't; I had gotten the impression that it was meant to be a sort of "comic crime" novel, but all the characters in it were unpleasant, the godlike detective Mr. Verity/Mr. Fathom the worst of all. As far as I'm concerned, this one can stay out of print.
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Jul 22, 2023 21:59
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So I felt like I need to read some more modern mystery writers, and on my latest visit to a used bookstore I picked up Malcolm Mackay's In the Cage Where Your Saviors Hide. I liked the book design, and private eye stuff in modern Scotland by a Scottish writer sounded promising. Okay, so it's set in a fictional city. Not a problem, I'm a fan of the 87th Precinct books so I'm used to fictional cities that are thinly disguised versions of real cities. Except ... this is also a fictional world where Scotland is an independent country with its own monarchy, and has colonized parts of Central America. That's a bit more different. The protagonist, it turns out, works for a "research agency" because he'd rather not deal with all the rules private detectives have to follow. The book introduces him at a party with lots of talk about how impressively cool and laid-back he is. He's there following a serial rapist/murderer, and he watches as the guy picks up a girl, trails them back to the man's apartment, waits for the screams to start, and then busts in and beats up the rapist, finishing up by stomping on his dick. He then turns the rapist over to the police, who are very grateful for the help and let him go with a pat on the head and several mentions of how funny the dick-stomping was. At which point I put the book aside. Has anyone else tried Mackay? Does it get better?
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Jul 22, 2023 23:07
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Selachian posted:Except ... this is also a fictional world where Scotland is an independent country with its own monarchy, and has colonized parts of Central America. That's a bit more different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
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Jul 23, 2023 01:26
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So I’ve been dipping my toe in mystery novels lately with some classics but was curious if anyone had any opinions about Thomas King’s work? I read his non mystery novel, Green Grass, Running Water a long time ago and enjoyed it and am interested in his DreadfulWater mysteries.
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Jul 23, 2023 02:49
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I wound up reading The Woman in the Wardrobe, the first Mr. Verity mystery, because I'd already ordered it (for some reason this one never got an ebook and has fallen out of print already so I had to eBay it), and found it was a lot better than How Doth the Little Crocodile, in part because it was actually funny and seemed to remember that Mr. Verity is supposed to be a colossal rear end in a top hat. In this one he actually goes around offending people and committing crimes, whereas the second book has him as the embodiment of divine judgment even though he spends all his time staying in hotels he doesn't like and complaining to the staff's faces about the food. I'm vaguely reminded about Everett True, who is funny as long as he's beating people up over trivial grievances, but becomes insufferable any time the writer thinks he has the moral high ground.
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Aug 1, 2023 18:14
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Was kindly redirected here from The Book Recommendation Thread.Rand Brittain posted:Margery Allingham, creator of the universal uncle Mr. Campion (start with Death of a Ghost or Police at the Funeral) Just had a few follow up questions: Since these are all a similar era to Christie, I imagine don't have to worry too much about graphic descriptions of blood and gore, right? Based on these Wikipedia articles, it sounds like Allingham's works are a pastiche of Sayer's, so should I start with Sayer before Allingham? Does it matter? When you say "start with X" what do you mean by that? Is it just because those are the best and you shouldn't bother if you don't like that one? I know people suggest their Star Trek viewing (start at season 2) or anime viewing (skip this filler arc) for various reasons. I'm hesitant to start with the recommendations for a few reasons: If I start with the best ones, then I don't have much to look forward to as they will necessarily go downhill, and I like believing I have good books ahead of me I enjoyed reading the Holmes works in order of writing to see how the prose changed (in Doyle's case, in my opinion it starts strong and gets even better, which is a help) I don't really fancy needing to discover new works terribly often so getting an entire series to read over months and years is much more appealing than hunting around. My time is worthless and I am in no rush to get anywhere So, I was probably just going to read things within a series in order of publication unless there's a compelling reason to not. At the same point, I see some comments here saying that Whose Body? (Sayer's first Whimsey book) isn't very good so maybe that isn't wise.
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Aug 7, 2023 10:02
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Magnetic North posted:Since these are all a similar era to Christie, I imagine don't have to worry too much about graphic descriptions of blood and gore, right? No. quote:Based on these Wikipedia articles, it sounds like Allingham's works are a pastiche of Sayer's, so should I start with Sayer before Allingham? Does it matter? I wouldn't call Allingham a pastiche of Sayers at all; they have very different goals in mind. quote:When you say "start with X" what do you mean by that? Is it just because those are the best and you shouldn't bother if you don't like that one? I know people suggest their Star Trek viewing (start at season 2) or anime viewing (skip this filler arc) for various reasons. If you're prepared to go through and read the whole series regardless, just read whatever you want.
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Aug 7, 2023 14:48
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Magnetic North posted:
Wimsey is worth reading from the beginning but remember Sayers is inventing a lot of tropes as she goes, so don't fault her for doing things others have imitated. We did Strong Poison as Book of the Month a while back and it's a good place to start: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3983771, but there is an ongoing book to book storyline that develops over the course of the Wimsey books so if reading out of order bothers you start with the first one. I tend to read Allingham's Campion as starting out as a light parody of Wimsey and then going off in his own direction after that. Sayers is probably the better writer but Campion the better character, imho. I would also, since you like reading things in chronological order, strongly recommend you try reading the complete Nero Wolfe books, all forty-odd, in publication order. He wrote one a year starting in the 30's and going to the 70's or so, so you get this marvelous 40-year snapshot of Manhattan and America changing over decades, it's immensely interesting.
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Aug 7, 2023 15:20
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When it comes to Wimsey, the one book I always recommend is Murder Must Advertise and it's got absolutely nothing to do with being clever about the mystery or having surprising twists; I'd even argue the (extremely cheesy) crimes are secondary to the shenanigans at the advertising agency. It's light, it's funny and it just flows well. Hell, the book has a chapter describing a cricket match. I have absolutely no idea how cricket is played or what any of the rules or scores mean - but I never skipped it on rereads, it's just fun. If you want a book with a more engaging mystery element, I'd go with The Nine Tailors. e: It also helps that they're both books where Wimsey only acts insufferable on purpose as opposed to just being that way. e2: There's also Sayers' short stories - while the quality varies wildly, I always loved their overly verbose names. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 19:50
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Thanks for all the suggestions. Looking forward to them.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:44
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