Mystery Thursday

So how many of you knew what I meant by Mystery Thursday? Oh, I forgot, no one is reading. Ah well. What I'm going to do is talk about mystery stories on Thursday. There are many reasons I could elaborate on as to why I am doing this, however there is only one real reason - I'm indulging myself. I like to read mysteries, I like to talk about them and the few people who read this blog are a captive audience!

Where to start? I'm been reading mysteries since I was, I don't know, 11-12 years old? I'm not really sure. Of course, I read Nancy Drew but I liked Trixie Belden best. My second favorite was the Donna Parker series. A couple of years ago I bought all the Donna Parker books (7) on ebay! Not as much but I also read & liked, The Dana Girls and Cherry Ames. I have somewhat eclectic tastes in reading so I also read Mickey Spillane and Perry Mason as I was growing up.

I'm not quite sure what direction I want to take with these posts & it is getting late so I think I'll start by talking about mystery genres. A few categories are (in no particular order):

• Cozy - generally a bloodless, neat murder, Agatha Christie is the best example.
  
• Historical
  
• Police Procedurals
  
• Hardboiled - Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe style
  
• Locked Room/Puzzle
• Legal
  
• Romantic Suspense
• Bibliomysteries
• Academic
• Medical
• Amateur Sleuth

I think the categories are pretty self-explanatory. I could go on listing categories & break these down into sub-categories but I think you get the idea that there are a lot of different mysteries. I've read in various places that people tend to stick one or two types. I don't know if that is true for most people but it definitely isn't for me! I can't even say that I have a favorite category - it would probably be whatever I'm currently reading. I'm sure my many astute readers are now asking themselves, who is her favorite author? Kind of, sort of a hard question and at the same time easy. There are so many authors I enjoy that it is difficult to narrow them down. However, if I truly had to choose one, it would be easy - P.D. James.

Anyway I started this post last night but for various, highly important, reasons didn't get it finished. So instead of talking more about mysteries I'm going to let this serve as a short introduction to the subject and will expound in detail upon either one of mystery genres or an author next week - whichever suits my fancy!!

Robin, the lonely (and mysterious) blog mistress