Let's Talk History of Crime Fiction

You don't have to read every page, make guacamole, or show up on time...anywhere! The easiest monthly book club you'll ever join.

Who wrote the first locked-room mystery?

How was the suspicious end of Edgar Allen Poe’s life as mysterious and creepy as his fiction?

What did the father of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley have to do with the origins of the manhunt thriller?

Starting Oct. 5 (in two weeks), join me monthly as I answer those questions and dozens more as I read Martin Edwards’s ¹600+ page, Edgar-winning The Life of Crime, a history of crime fiction spanning two centuries. And I’m inviting you to read it with me!

Each month, I’ll tackle six chapters (about sixty pages), sprinkling these posts with trivia and also, hopefully, finding one specific craft issue, trope, genre development, or author to focus on more thoroughly.

What’s your part in all this? Join in any way that suits you. Order the book (or not), read ahead, read behind, participate actively in the comments, or do none of the work and just soak up the odd discoveries and the reading recs as an occasional lurker—the choice is yours!

Why this project?

If you’re like me, you have a fearsome stack of books on your nightstand—and maybe a few more that have fallen off and gotten kicked under the bed.

I will never read all the books I want to or feel I should.

For that reason, I find deadlines helpful.

Over the last many months, I have promised myself I would read this tome on the history of crime fiction, which promises to answer many questions I have. A promise ain’t enough.²

But now, with you as my accountability partners—hello, friends!—I am going to do this thing.

A few authors we’ll be covering in two weeks, based on chapters 1-6, aside from the ones already hinted at above: Wilkie Collins, Louisa May Alcott (whaaat?), Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle (snore….just kidding! I know Edwards is going to teach me something great about Sherlock Holmes!).

As suspense writers, I think we often worry we are overusing certain tropes or structures. How freeing it will be to realize—as I predict we will!—that writers have been playing with the same tropes and structures for centuries.

I also expect we’ll discover some authors (probably female? just guessing) who got largely forgotten over the course of crime fiction’s evolution.

Feel free to drop your greetings and thoughts in the comments if you’d like to commit publicly to reading along, or simply pop back around in two weeks and we’ll get started.

1. Of course, if you want to…

2. That sounded so much like a song lyric I had to google and shazam—yes, it’s a Hall and Oates tune