Here at WU, we try to be even-handed in the genre fiction we talk about. But one genre that I feel we’ve given less blogtime than others is the mystery genre. And I’m sorry about that. Mysteries are one of the bigger slices of the genre fiction market, and we’ve given it short shrift.

I’ll admit it right now: I’m not a fan of mystery novels.

I dig suspense, thrillers, literary who-dun-its. A genre novel with a mystery subplot I can tolerate. But classic mystery, eh, it leaves me cold.

My husband, however, loves mystery novels so much, he reviews them for library journals. We’ve got ARCs of forthcoming mysteries coming out the wazoo at our house.

But I’ve decided to make a real effort at discovering good mystery novels and interviewing those authors for you. Which is a plea for you all to recommend mystery authors in the comment section. I can’t promise they’ll agree to an interview, but I’ll try to snag them for us.

I asked my mystery-junkie husband what he considered a good mystery read. He said, “It’s easier to tell you what earns a downrating from me” (downrating is reviewer lingo for a pan review).

If you write mysteries, here’s a window into what gets a mystery reviewer’s gag reflex going:

Female in jeopardy subplot. Or ‘fem-jep’ as he calls it. “It’s a tired device to inject high stakes into a stalling narrative.” Coming in second place: ‘kid-jep’.

Cats. “If you have to put a cat in your book, be aware that most men will not read it.” I’m just passing the info on.

Protagonists who don’t bother to call the cops. “I can’t stand it when the amateur detective goes into the killer’s menacing lair without calling law enforcement. Sometimes the amateur has a good reason, but usually they don’t. It’s stupid.” Again, his words.

Killers who aren’t introduced early in the narrative. “The reader needs to be able to figure out the mystery just as if they were the main character,” he said. “I hate it when the killer appears in the last third of the book. It’s like the writer couldn’t figure out how to hide the obvious villain from the reader, so the solution was to leave them out until they couldn’t avoid it any longer.”

There you have it from someone who reads and reviews a good chunk of mysteries. Please use this information wisely.

And I’m looking forward to your suggestions. At least one of my beach reads this summer must be a mystery.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
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