Writers are the Best Teachers

 Q: We keep writing new books, but there are so many classics out there. What are the crime fiction classics you think every writer should read?

from Susan

 

What a good question! Note the focus is on what writers should be sure and read, not what readers may relish most, and that’s a distinction with a difference. As readers, we sometimes settle into books that may not be great as examples of elegant, articulate, and brilliant, but which give us immense pleasure anyway. 

 

For me, one example of pleasure first is the entire catalog of Rex Stout Nero Wolfe mysteries. My New York City isn’t his, but I’m a native and visiting an older version of Manhattan and environs is never going to disappoint. Some of the plots are terrific and I wouldn’t know who did the deed if I hadn’t read the book a few times. But are they strong enough to help writers? Maybe not in 2024. Probably the same answer for Agatha Christie’s best novels, too.

 

Sara Paretsky’s series, especially the earlier ones, hits the mark for me. She has created a strongly individual protagonist in V.I. Warshawski with well-defined strengths and vulnerabilities and an unyielding moral code that propels her forward logically in her pursuit of wrongdoers. Paretsky has found a way to confront venality and greed that escapes preaching, makes the most of surprises, and has plenty of tension. I think her body of work is a classic in the genre.

 

Walter Mosley is another writer worthy of being a model of the best kind of writing. In his characters and their language, he embraces and invites readers into an expanded relationship with cultures beyond what they may have known. Again, no preaching, just exciting prose, ways to identify with his protagonists, colorfully written environments, danger that takes our breath away, and crimes that beg our attention. He set high standards that writers are still studying.

 

Georges Simenon mastered the art of an internally-focused examination of crime from the perspective of the investigator, nuanced and flawed. Sometime the result was creepy, sometimes dark, but to me his work -stripped of sentimentality and of the charm readers like -  insisted that I acknowledge cruelty and the possibility of justice and or redemption. Never a light read but one that stuck with me. I’ve only read his novels in translation and perhaps because his work is better known to French readers, he may not be considered in this country to be a classic.

 

There are other writers who I think provide excellent models for writers for one or more reasons. Jacqueline Winspearso totally and believably embraces wartime England’s terrible struggles that her individual books resonate, and her series is completely interconnected and engaging. Donna Leon built a world for her Venetian policeman that has held up though a series of novels and that includes fine secondary characters who are woven into every part of the stories focused on the kinds of business and corporate crimes we too often look past. John LeCarre is almost beyond overstating as the spy novelist of greatest distinction, his only rival in my mind the brilliant Martin Cruz Smith. Both writers created protagonists who can amply shoulder the burden of dealing with the intimate, corrupt world of government without control or conscience.

 

There are other classic crime writers my Minds colleagues will spotlight, and I know I have overlooked some I haven’t read enough of or just didn’t respond to as a writer. The treasures of crime fiction are many and varied as are the writers who plumb good writing for inspiration. And that’s as it should be.

Not to claim anything like comparative status, but here are a couple of my recent in-print books and I need to add I'd be so happy if more people considered buying one!