by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Edgar Alan Poe is credited with creating the modern detective mystery in 1841 when his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published in Graham’s Magazine. It wasn’t long before American women began penning mysteries as well.

According to a 2011 survey published by the mystery writer organization Sisters in Crime, women purchase 68 percent of mystery novels. Plus, women write many of these novels and have been doing so since Victorian times.

Women Detective Collection
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is home to the Robbie Emily Dunn Collection of American Detective Fiction, which encompasses 200 writers, 85 percent of whom were women. It contains a copy of the 1867 novel The Dead Letter by Seeley Regester, a pseudonym for Metta Victoria Fuller Victor. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of this publication was that Victor raised nine children yet still found time to write. Unfortunately, UNCG describes The Dead Letter as deadly boring.

But a woman became the most famous American mystery writer of her age 11 years later. In 1878, Anna Katharine Green wrote a detective story so popular, that it became “the first bona fide American bestseller,” according to Mystery Scene magazine, which refers to Green as the “mother” of American mystery.

Green was the daughter of an attorney and drew on what she learned from her father in writing The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer’s Story. UNC notes that the novel contained the first literary use of ballistics testimony. Similar to the fictional mystery writer, J.B. Fletcher, of the "Murder, She Wrote" television series, UNCG says, Green “was often asked to help solve real crimes.”

For many years, Mystery Scene notes, Yale University law classes used The Leavenworth Case to demonstrate “the perils of trusting circumstantial evidence.” Nowadays, Green is mostly unknown; but The Leavenworth Case can be found online at the Gutenberg Project for readers who want to delve into the mysteries of the detective genre’s development.

Revealing a short list of favorites
This article is what you call a “hub” story, the spokes of which are the mini reviews of mysteries by some of my favorite women writers. They are posted in alphabetical order by author on the Adult Mix page, but many may be of interest to teen readers.

All of these authors are well worth acquaintance if you enjoy strong plotting, in-depth characterization and settings so real that you feel you are there. These are writers who will take you away from wherever, whatever and whoever is bothering you. Some are relatively new to my nightstand while others are long-time, recurrent visitors. I crossed paths with all, by serendipity, at the public library.

• Margaret Coel — The Spider's Web
• Irene Fleming — The Edge of Ruin
• Shamini Flint — A Most Peculiar Maylaysian Mystery
• Tana French — Faithful Place
• Sue Grafton — V Is for Vengeance
• Elly Griffiths — The Crossing Places
• Lene Kaaberbol and Agnette Friis — The Boy in the Suitcase
• Rett MacPherson — The Blood Ballad
• Sara Paretsky — Breakdown

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Spider's Web, by Margaret Coel
Penguin Group (USA), 2010,
ISBN 978-0-425-23660-4

Coel is the author of two series, my favorite being her Wind River mysteries, which involve a Jesuit priest, Father John O’Malley, and Vicky Holden, a lawyer who specializes in representing cases involving her Arapaho tribe. Most of the stories take place in the Arapaho and Shoshone Wind River Reservation of Wyoming.

In Coel’s novels, you can taste the dust or frost in the air and feel the dry grass and hard-packed earth underfoot. Her skills at setting, characterization, plotting and interpreting culture are powerful. The Spider’s Web focuses on the puzzling death of a young man as he prepares for the rigors of a sacred celebration.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Edge of Ruin, by Irene Fleming
Minotaur, 2010
ISBN 978-0-312-57520-5

As the title and the cover art of this novel indicates, it involves a Hollywood cliffhanger of an ending. Fleming also has written a variety of novels under the name Kate Gallison. The Edge of Ruin gives readers a fascinating picture of the cut-throat, silent-movie days of Thomas Edison and other early film producers.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, by Shamini Flint
Piatkus Books, 2009
ISBN 978-0-749-92975-6

Flint is a children’s author as well as a writer of adult mysteries. A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder is the first novel in her Her Inspector Singh series. Singh is an overweight, rumply, taciturn police detective who is, nevertheless, charming due to his essential goodness. Inspector Singh may be in a bad mood about having to leave his home in Singapore to solve a celebrity murder in Malaysia, but he is a dogged investigator who strives to set the world right.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Faithful Place, by Tana French
Viking, 2010
ISBN 978-0-143-11949-4

French’s gritty, working-class Dublin doesn’t seem all that far away from the mean streets of blue-collar Boston in Dennis LeHane’s mysteries. It is no surprise that French chose  LeHane's Mystic River as one of her top 10 favorite mysteries in an article for the Guardian. Similar to so many of LeHane’s stories, French’s tales are driven by dark, long-buried secrets of friends and family.

So far, French has published three novels, all interconnected through related characters, but not really a series. Each is haunting in its own way. In Faithful Place, a detective learns that although you can go home, it may be more like a visit to Hell than to a safe harbor.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

V Is for Vengeance, by Sue Grafton
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011
ISBN 978-0-399-15786-8

Grafton’s novels occur in alphabetical order from “A” to “V.” A master of plotting, characterization, and deep detail, Grafton never disappoints. Her central character, private investigator Kinsey Milhone, is a loner who specializes in insurance fraud but often finds herself reluctantly pursuing cases far afield. Milhone doesn’t know how to say “No” to questionable clients or friends.

In V Is for Vengeance, it is Milhone’s chance observation of a shoplifting incident that sends her in harm’s way with organized crime. But before she has a clue to the trouble ahead, it appears that the shoplifter has resolved her sins by jumping off a bridge. Stunned by his dead girlfriend's secret life of crime and her apparent suicide, the shoplifter's lover hires Milhone to untangle the truth. Meanwhile, Milhone helps a former jailbird friend hide from the danger that is tailing him, but which he refuses to explain. These bad omens are just the beginning of the black eyes, broken nose and bloody mess that  Milhone faces in novel "V."

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Boy in the Suitcase, by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnette Friis
Soho Press, English translation 2011
ISBN 978-1-569-47981-0

Nina Borg is a nurse and an ardent advocate for the underdog, who works with refugee children in Denmark. It is her do-good nature and persistence that causes a long-estranged friend to ask Nina to pick up a suitcase from a public locker in the Copenhagen train station.

The suitcase is unusually heavy. When Nina opens it, she discovers a toddler, alive but powerfully drugged. Soon Nina is living on the run, temporarily abandoning family and work to protect the boy from the evil that chases him.

The Boy in the Suitcase is compelling and will cause readers to search for more translations of works by this deft writing team. Unfortunately, there is little information about Kaaberbol and Friis online. This is their first novel in the Borg series and was translated to English by Kaaberbol. Similar to Sara Paretsky’s work it focuses heavily on fighting for social injustice.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

The Blood Ballad, by Rett MacPherson
Minotaur Books, 2008
ISBN 978-0-312-36222-5

This is the eleventh book in this Missouri author's series of Torie O'Shea cozies. Victory “Torie” O’Shea is a genealogist, town historian and booster, tour guide, amateur detective, and devoted, wisecracking mother. She excels at prying into the past to explain the present. In this one, Torie digs up a dangerous secret — literally, long buried — about local country music royalty connected to her family.

Trouble always begins in MacPherson’s stories during ordinary activities, as in The Blood Ballad when Torie and a companion flee from bullets at dusk during a community bird-watching competition. Stopping to take a breath, they get sprayed by a skunk. But then the story really takes off when an antique trunk hurtles downhill toward them, depositing a dead, bloody body. MacPherson's mayhem and Americana along the Mississippi would be fun to watch on “Masterpiece Mystery.”

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Breakdown, by Sara Paretsky
Putnam, 2012
ISBN 978-0-399-15783-7

V.I. Warshawski is the daughter of a Polish-American policeman and an Italian immigrant opera singer. She grew up tough on Chicago’s South Side, an area that the private investigator and lawyer hasn’t strayed far from as an adult and which always figures in the Warshawski stories. Breakdown is a fast-paced assault on tabloid journalism empires,  right-wing politics amid mucky electioneering.

As with a number of the books in this Library Mix series of mystery mini reviews, Paretsky’s novels are often driven by terrible, deeply hidden secrets. Always timely, Paretsky tracks American popular culture as well as politics. Breakdown touches on the current teenage passion for paranormal fiction. As the novel opens, a group of girls who are barely teenagers giggle as they film each other with cell phones in the dark of night. They are dancing around a tomb in an abandoned graveyard during a creepy hazing ritual. But they soon discover that the “vampire” they may have seen is more likely a murderer.

by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

Broken, A Mystery, by Karin Fossum, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010,
ISBN 0-547-52036-0


 A line of sad-looking people lingers in the driveway of an author’s house at all hours. “There are so many of them, they are hard to count,” she reflects while preparing for bed.

After midnight, the stairs creak. One of the strangers has entered her bedroom and her life uninvited. Similar to all the others in the queue, he isn’t real. He is an unnamed man who lives in the limbo of her imagination — an unformed character who demands that she create a story for him to inhabit.

Meek, mild, and murderous
So begins Karin Fossum’s Broken, an unusual and thought-provoking mystery. Although the author character remains unnamed throughout the novel, she gives her meek anti-hero a name, Alvar Eide, and a life as a quiet art gallery salesman who can’t say no and is forever changed by the demands of a drug- addicted acquaintance.

Although it is subtitled “A Mystery,” Fossum lets readers in on whodunit without subterfuge. There is no puzzling over clues; we know what happened and why. But the book presents other riddles. For me, Broken is ultimately about the mysteries of how a novel evolves, why the author creates it, and how the characters affect both novelist and readers.

As Eide’s story grows, so does concern for him. The sleeplessness of the nameless author telegraphs her worry. Readers may find themselves troubling over her stress as well as Eide’s emotionally sterile life that proves to be fertile ground for bad decisions.

Eide reminds me of a butterfly, which can never fly properly if it doesn’t have enough room to completely stretch out its wings upon emerging from its cocoon. His childhood has made it nearly impossible for him to form the family and friendships necessary to enjoy and navigate social interaction.

Characters who come to life
It is difficult not to believe in Eide’s existence; he seems so real. Some readers might even visualize themselves grabbing his shoulders and facing Eide for a heart-to-heart bit of advice. But it is a wasted fantasy. The fictional author who is creating him lets Eide be whom he is, someone who recoils from touch and involvement let alone bravery.

I was reminded of this transference of feelings — real-life worry for a fictitious person — long after I finished Broken, said goodbye to Eide and let him disappear into the queue of characters that may linger on or fall into potholes along the driveway of my memory.

But sometimes characters step out of line and remain with me, demanding my fascination and concern. It’s difficult to say goodbye to them. Such is the case not only with Eide but also with the mysterious, unnamed author who creates his story. I wonder whether she ever reappears in the queue of characters in Karin Fossum’s imagination requesting an opportunity to tell a new story. I would like to hear from her again.