Anyone else interested in crime fiction?

[Don Alaska]

I have become a big fan of crime fiction. I read a lot of true crime stuff over the years, but have now switched to mostly fiction. The Brits have led the way in this genre over most of the past 130 years or so, beginning with Sherlock Holmes. Doyle wasn't the first I guess, but he was certainly the most popular of his time and the first to use science and medicine in detective fiction. Doyle was followed by Chesterton and his Father Brown series. They were also very good and entertaining (to me at least) but completely different from Conan Doyle's work. Agatha Christie set the model for a school of female writers in the 1920s and 1930s. Christie and Chesterton overlapped a little, but most of Father Brown was published before Christie's characters got really going. Christie and her school of writers mostly dealt with upper-class folks and a limited group of suspects in a somewhat confined environment. Christie and Chesterton were followed by a single crime novel by Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, which has been referred to by some as the "first modern crime novel". I am no expert, but Greene's work is definitely different from his predecessors.

American crime fiction I have encountered is mostly private investigator stuff similar to Agatha Christie, but much more crude in content and environment in the 1930s through the 1950s. Sam Spade is no Hercule Poirot and vice versa. Recent crime fiction on both sides of the Atlantic has centered mostly on police detectives and murder cases. Interestingly, Conan Doyle's stories rarely were about murder.

I now read a lot of British stuff available on Amazon. I enjoy most the 1970's and 1980s stories before DNA and "CCTV" became the norm in crime. Brother Cadfael books were published from the 1970s through the 1990s, but took place in the 12th century, so they are in a different category altogether. Historically quite accurate and many of the characters were real people I like the Masters and Green stories that take place in the 1970s and deal mostly with poisonings. In modern U.S. stuff, I enjoy the early novels by John Sandford--the Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers books. I have not read any of the Letty Davenport books.

 

[Yvonne Smith]

I also like reading crime fiction, and also legal drama fiction. I have found that I really enjoy Robert Bailey, who writes legal action stories about the Huntsville area. He not only writes a great story, but it is in series, and also talks about places in the area where I am now living.
His books are all on Kindle Unlimited, which makes it easy to read them as soon as they come out.

Another favorite author is Thomas Perry, who writes the Jane Whitefield series of books. Jane is a Native American from the Great Lakes area, and she helps people “vanish” and start a new life when they are innocent and being pursued and almost killed. There are a whole series of books about Jane, plus Perry writes other books as well, and I have enjoyed the ones I have read, but like the Jane Whitefield ones the best.
Thomas Perry does not have his books on KU, so I only buy them when I find them on sale.

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

My mother was into the crime story magazines when I was young. Most of it about real cases, but some was clearly labeled as fiction. I read some of this when I was maybe 8 or 9. Enough to overreact for a time and wonder what kinds of robbers and murderers might be lurking behind every hedge just waiting to grab me.

It never became "my thing" though. But I do enjoy stories with a crime subplot, and as it happens an awful lot of classic science fiction has just that. Not as much of it ever translated into the pop "sci-fi" we've seen in movies and TV, but there are notable exceptions.

 

[Tony Page]

I enjoy Catherine Coulter' FBI series.
I have read in sequence from the very first book (The Cove), because there not only a good "who done it", but their's a interesting secondary story a thread about the two main characters, Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock, they meet, marry, have a child.
I haven't read any of the books since the house fire, I believe I read the first 17 book. They were all destroyed in the fire.

I also like most of Nelson DeMille's books.
I haven't been doing much novel reading lately, I started one or two but just can't finished them.

 

[Axel Slingerland]

I like reading Crime novels as long as they're in digital form with scalable fonts. If I can't pump the font size up to make it clear for me to read, I'll wait for the movie...

I haven't read any of the books since the house fire, I believe I read the first 17 book. They were all destroyed in the fire.

Along with other more important things, I imagine. I'm sorry to hear about that.