Mysteries with influence

Good writers always influence their readers, especially when their readers are other writers. That's obvious, of course, yet Books to Die For, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke and published in 2012, underscores this very obvious statement.

The idea was to ask some of the world greatest living mystery writers to write about their favorite mystery novels.  Thus Joe R. Lansdale writes a brief essay about Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, Laura Lippman writes about James M. Cain's Love's Lovely Counterfeit, Max Allan Collins writes about Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, Kathy Reichs writes about Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs and so forth. This is great stuff for any reader of crime novels, a good way to both revisit old favorites and to discover novels you missed and really must read.

Yet what struck me most about this book was how virtually every author discussed — and there are more than a hundred of them — has been influential in some significant way. Many of the contributors talk about how a particular book or author helped shape their own careers. Joseph Wambaugh, for example, tells how Truman Capote, the author of In Cold Blood, led him to write The Onion Field. Elmore Leonard says The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins made his own fiction much better.

In other cases, the influence was much broader and even more profound. What people like Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie did for mystery fiction has been commented upon many times. But how many of us have considered the impact of the Nancy Drew books, Sue Grafton's A Is for Alibi, Patricia Cornwell's Postmortem or Eric Ambler's espionage thrillers? Every year or so, it would seem, a mystery novel comes along that sends crime fiction off in a new direction, and the genre is much better for it.

Many of the entries here may surprise you. Most readers probably do not think of A.S. Byatt, Stephen King and Donna Tartt as mystery writers, yet their books are discussed here. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams gets an entry, as does Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Other authors are notable for their absence. The editors do a good job of including crime novels from around the world. 

This book, while not as good as almost any of the books discussed in it, is nevertheless a feast for mystery fans.