Question of the week: the first mystery
It’s time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics.
This week’s question: if you read mystery novels, what was the first mystery novel you ever read? No wrong questions, obviously.
For myself, I think it was TELL NO ONE by Harlan Coben. This was way back in 2001, and I had a long car ride coming up. At that time, I didn’t read anything except fantasy and science fiction, but I had gotten TELL NO ONE as a present, and I didn’t have anything else to read in the car. So I started reading TELL NO ONE during the ride. It’s about a ER physician whose wife was murdered eight years ago. Then one day, out of the blue, the physician gets a message that could only have come from her. Suddenly people show up to kill him, and the physician finds himself on the run from the agents of a sinister billionaire.
I was definitely hooked, and I’ve read mysteries and thrillers on and off since then. I think this was good for me long-term since I ended up a writer, and it’s good for writers to read widely in different genres. You can always tell when a science fiction novel, for example, was written by someone who has never read anything but SF.
-JM
A Study in Scarlet, Doyle. I was 12, I had chickenpox and was confined to my room. I begged my father for something to read, and he handed me a massive book – The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Two days later I asked for other books by him. I’m still not a fan of mysteries, but Doyle was a great author.
Hardy Boys #1The Tower Treasure. It was a gift from friend’s of my parents. I was about 7 or 8 and in the hospital for an extended stay. I still have it. They were the same people to give me the first Sports Illustrated magazine I read.
I read the whole hardy boys series. It was a good starting point but it was more of an instruction manual on police procedure at the time.