Monday Machination: Mystery Fiction

Today's Monday post relates to a post on genre that I have been working on recently. I'll finish it eventually, but until then, here is a little something.

Mystery fiction is an umbrella genre encompassing specialized fiction like medical thrillers, police procedural, and "hardboiled" fiction. It is associated most usually with crime fiction, although supernatural thrillers are not uncommon. The name should tell you exactly what it is, but in a nutshell, mystery fiction is at its heart a puzzle and solution story. There are many cliches in mystery fiction like the alcoholic detective, the ditsy girl that solves the case, and the main suspect is innocent all along.

Probably the most famous mysteries are those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, and the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew series. It grew in popularity in the 20's and 30's, giving rise to pulp magazines before declining in the 50's. Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine is one of the remaining pulp magazines today, continuing to churn out monthly volumes since the 1950's.

Today, mystery stories remain popular. The genre is popular in television (NYPD Blue and its ilk), books (James Patterson is amazing), and comics. Whodunit fiction is surprisingly selling well. Murder mystery dinner theaters pop up all over the place and have amazing online resources for at-home murder mystery parties. Mystery fiction is a very neat genre when done well. Not many can do it well though, as Tod Goldberg (wrote the books Burn Notice is based on) likes to point out. Check out his rant... it is hysterical.

So do you have any favorite mysteries that you could read over and over, or that you recommend to everyone? I cut my teeth on Nancy Drew so this is a favorite of mine even though I write fantasy.

Love is love, no matter the back story. <3 DS

Friday Five: My top 5 Writers

September is a crazy month apparently. There are so many month-long and daily holidays. Don't believe me? Check this list. And that is just a list of the weird ones. One that I liked was "Be Kind to Editors and Writers" Month. Sending a special shout-out and ILY message to my wonderful editor, Booksteve! Also, International Square Dance Month is just awesome, but that is a whole 'nother story that I'm just not going to get into.

In honor of BKEW month, today's Friday Five is my favorite writers. I made a list of my favorite series back in June. If you don't remember it, go here. My list of favorite authors is a little different.

1. Garth Nix. This is one of those "duh" things around here. I love this guy. He is fab. Everything he writes is fab. Also, he is Australian so he has an accent.

2. Neil Gaiman. I did not list Neil on my favorite series list because he doesn't really write in a series per say. However, he has written several books that I personally own and have read multiple times. Good Omens and Coraline come to mind. He is solely responsible for the awesomeness of Robert Di Nero dancing in a dress in Stardust. I say that because he wrote the book that the movie was based upon. He is very vocal on Twitter. I follow him on both my official Twitter and my celebristalking account. He also has an English accent.

3. Carolyn Keene. Yes, I realize that Carolyn Keene is a pseudonym for a revolving collective of ghostwriters but it still stands. I found my love of reading in Nancy Drew as a kid. There really isn't much more to say about that.

4. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis tie for 4^th place in my list. Some people might flame me for saying so, but in my opinion, they are very similar writers. They were good friends that worked together, wrote together (they were members of the Inklings), and achieved much notoriety within the fantasy genre. Tolkien is considered the "father" of modern high fantasy and was ranked #6 in Forbe's 2008 list of "50 Greatest British Writers since 1945." Lewis came in at #11 on the same list. The article "On Fairy-Stories" that I wrote about in my first Tuesday Tale is arguably my favorite Tolkien piece, although I do love the Middle-earth stories. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia is #2 on my favorite series list. As a standalone story, I really enjoyed Lewis's The Screwtape Letters as well.

5. I rated the two above me together so I could include George Orwell in my list. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are two of the best books ever. Seriously, the Modern Library ranked 1984 at 13 and Animal Farm at 31 out of the top 100 English-language Novels of the 20^th century. These books challenged modern thinking, showed the incredible pitfalls of ignorance, and coined some vernacular that is still used today (like the term Big Brother). The fact that 1984 has been banned or challenged many, many times speaks volumes of its influence. It is at the top of the list of Wikipedia's most commonly challenged books of 1990-1999. I'm not sure if that list is in order of the most challenges or not (it doesn't say).

Side note: I want to belong to an exclusive writing group that has an awesome name like the Inklings.

Love is love, no matter the back story. <3 DS