Something Old, Something New, Something Not Blue by Gabriel Valjan

 

Q: What are your most and least favoured sub-genres of crime fiction. And, in both cases, why? Since it’s this time of year, is there anything you’re exhorting yourself to read more of?

 

Happy New Year, Everyone.

 

Another year, another 365 days on the rollercoaster of life. We may not be able to control what happens to us or around us, but we can control how we react to the good, the bad, and the ugly in life. We have a whole new year of new books, old books, and Criminal Minds welcomes aboard two new members, Eric Beetner and Harini Nagendra.

 

Let’s get to it.

 

I’ve been a long-time fan of historical crime fiction, especially when a true-crime has inspired the author, or a famous person populates the pages. For me, the two game-changers were Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, where the true crime was the murderous activities of America’s first serial killer during the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, and Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, in which we see a different side to Theodore Roosevelt, who was once New York City Police Commissioner. We are witnesses to deductive reasoning and introduced to the new technologies of fingerprint analysis and the first foray into criminal psychology, which competed with eugenics.

 

Other titles in the subgenre that I have enjoyed are Robert Harris’s Ancient Rome Trilogy, and Lindsey Davis’s Didius Falco series. All of Ellis Peters’s Cadfael books are dear to my heart. For something more ‘modern’, I’d recommend Mally Becker’s latest Revolutionary War Mystery, The Paris Mistress, which is out today. Since I write about Boston and ethnic tensions in my Shane Cleary series, I look forward to Frances McNamara’s Boston-based second entry in the Nutshell Murder Mystery series, Three-Decker Murder In A Nutshell.

WHY. It takes skill in choosing what to include and what to exclude, and yet write in a way that is faithful to the period for social attitudes and speech. I like learning how we used to think about certain topics, and deciding whether we’ve evolved or digressed.

 

What I don’t care for…serial killers and vampires. Now, I know that I pointed to Larsen above, but the reason I dislike books about serial killers, but not that book is because, for me, his book was the first for me. It was a game-changer, like Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs. The creepy and predatory dimension to the criminals was unnerving. Both books would spawn imitations, as did Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire. Not that vampires were new, but she made them sympathetic, although best kept at a distance. While I appreciated the writing, what sets these authors apart was the unique take the authors took. I think of crime as an act of passion, something wrong gone worse. Where is there justice when the undead are already dead, and a sociopath has such a bizarre way of thinking that it could be seductive or profoundly sinister? I also didn’t like the fact the publishing industry latched onto a ‘concept’ and ran it into the ground.

 

In 2024, I will cautiously explore psychological thrillers. This may sound weird, but I will search for ones that don’t have the Done-to-Death color scheme that publishers have been using to flood the market. You know what I’m talking about. I don’t want another Gone Girl, Girl On A Train, or Woman in the Window. Sense a theme there? My first stop is to explore more thriller-suspense titles, starting with the deep dark side of a small New England coastal town, multiple point of views and unreliable narrators, from an author who takes chances with each new book, Edwin Hill’s WHO TO BELIEVE.