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7/2/2010 9:42:47 AM
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The Editors
Posts 11
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In honor of the holiday weekend, what are your favorite mystery novels set in the United States' past?
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7/3/2010 5:31:21 PM
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stanbrown
Posts 16
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Caleb Carr's The Alienist is hands-down my favorite historical mystery. His recreation of Gilded Age New York City is so rich and well done.
I want to like other historical mysteries set in the United States, but when I have tried some, they just don't seem right to me, somehow. I feel like I'm seeing anachronisms or else attempts to sound "period" that come off as false and stilted. Maybe I'm hypersensitive. I've enjoyed more British mysteries set in the 1920s/30s era. Some of the British historicals set in the Victorian period annoy me, too, with anachronisms. (Current authors seem to want to depict the English class system as much more permeable than I think it would have been before World War I.)
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7/4/2010 8:40:20 AM
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Leigh
Posts 211
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I agree with Stan. Authors shouldn't go into great detail to prove they know what they're talking about, but I've often read stories where I knew the author didn't have a clue. I critiqued an on-line story set partly in the desert Southwest at the turn of the century. The protagonist walked into a long abandoned shack and immediately began pumping water. I mentioned pumps didn't work that way, that they'd have to be primed, particularly after the leathers dried out. The author said he'd "take it under advisement."
Like Stan, I prefer British historicals, so rather than name modern authors, I'll mention tales I enjoyed as a kid, Boothe Tarkington's Penrod stories. Penrod reminded me of a cross between Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Dennis the Menace.
In one of the books, Penrod Jashber, Penrod plays an unfortunate investigator with much less luck than Tom Sawyer, detective. The stories tended to be both funny and a little sad. As an adult, I wonder if they'd still read the same?
Oops! Almost forgot to mention Criminal Brief published a list of Independence Day stories!
edited by Leigh on 7/4/2010
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7/4/2010 11:54:10 PM
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Jeff Baker
Posts 132
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S.S. Rafferty's stories about Capt. Jeremy Cork, who solves what his Yeoman Wellman Oaks dissaprovingly calls "social puzzles" in the years leading up to Independence. Rafferty wrote one story set in each of the colonies as a way of celebrating the Bicentennial ( collected as "Cork of the Colonies.") There are a couple of other Cork stories, one called (I think) "The Invisible Indian" and the other "The Incomplete Salmagundi," a novella which appeared in AHMM (My apologies for not having the issue on hand to tell the date and year. I think it was in the 1980's.) All the Cork stories are great fun!
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7/6/2010 10:11:40 AM
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Robert Lopresti
Posts 67
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I'm a sucker for historicals (hey, my novel is set in 1963, which is definitely far enough back to have required lots of research..who knew that the army's favorite pin-up girl in the early sixties was Jane Fonda?). I love Raymond Paul's Quincannon novels, set in pre-civil war NY. Each is a courtroom book based on a true murder of the era.
Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody novels are wonderful. WIlliam Martshall's New Yourk Detective series (set in the late 1800s)
Too early in the morning to think of more!
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