My favorite mystery writers and more 2/18/26

Last night I was searching for something to watch in my ongoing struggle against melancholy. The melancholy could be genetic, my father had it. Or it could be a result of my sugar binge of chocolates on Valentine's Day, or Seasonal Affective Disorder - no sunshine for a month, being housebound - who knows - a mystery. Anyhow a good series will keep my mind focused on the outside world of fiction. the outside world of reality is too depressing.

I have to tell a small but to me funny anecodote here. I was so sad yesterday that while I was on my way to lunch with a friend (always helps me cheer up) tears were sliding down my cheeks. I couldn't listen to npr on the radio - too much sad stuff - and 88.5 my usual music radio station was playing some chaotic, raucous loud aggressive music not at all helpful. I turned the dial until I came to a Southern blues guitar. The singer began to sing "I live on lonely street. I'm so lonesome I could die." It struck me so funny so fast that I was laughing out loud. Me crying in the car and the blues man so lonely he could die!

Anyhow I got cheered by lunch but sunk again by evening, so I was again sifting through the detritius of our media world for something engaging but not depressing to watch on my laptop. To my surprise I found "One for the Money." A Janet Evanovich novel had been turned into a movie starring Katherine Heigel! There was a period of about 15 years when I devoured all kinds of mysteries in order to fend off an ongoing more severe depression following the deaths of my mother and then my father. Books were the life raft that kept my head above water and eventually floated me out. In 2011 after my father's tragic death - (and arent't they all tragic?) I was kind of paralyzed. I don't know what made me turn to Outdoor Girls on a Hike, but I did. My introduction to Outdoor Girls on a Hike (published in the 1920's) was in my Grandmother Lyon's basement where there was a bookcase full of books no one else read to my astonishment - treasure! I was about 10 when I found Outdoor Girls. I didn't know then that it was a series. I only had the one volume, a dusty dark blue hardcover book. I was in love at first read! Here were these girls ALONE hiking and canoeing and solving mysteries! They were unafraid (I was terrified of everything) and they were jaunty and cheerful and competent. They had fun.

So after finding more adventures featuring the Outdoor Girls thanks to amazon, I turned to P. D. James mysteries. I don't know why, but I read everything I could get and I bought every cd audio book of her work - boxed sets. I was finding my way out of the tunnel of despair.

Then I found Dorothy Sayers! And I read everything I could find of her novels. These were the days before I became an amazon addict, so I had to go to book stores to find the books, and libraries. The tunnel out of depression via reading led to the subway system and Agatha Christie and all her books and her movies and then, I met the fun and trashy neighborhood girls: Janet Evanovitch, Patricia Cornwell, and Lisa Scottoline.

I read all of their books too. Those novels are all gone now - I gave them away and donated them to libraries. Most recently I read ALL of Louise Penny's novels. the Three Pines mysteries. I think the first was Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery. I passed them on to a friend and she passed them on to a friend and soon about 4 friends of hers were reading them all and THEY have beeen turned into movies too viewable on amazon prime!

One for the Money, is the name of the Janet Evanovitch novel made into a movie with Katherine Heigl, who I love as a comic actress. In her portrayal of Stephanie Plum, bail bond hunter, she portrays a kind of jaunty innocent, a daredevil always getting out on a limb, but not losing hope. She is not held back by her upbringing though she is fond and respectful of that world. She is not yet, however, ready for a new world. Lisa Scottoline's fictional lawyer heroine is Bennie Rosato, she is the new world. She is not only a lawyer but has her own law firm.

There is a lot of the chronology of the struggle of women in the class system that is so familiar to me, having been born in South Philadelphia and being the only female in my family in any generation up to my great nieces, who managed to find their way to college and careers. Stephanie Plum and Bennie Rosato are so familiar to me. They are me. They are me when I was trying to put myself through college by working as a Kelly Girl and Manpower Temp and me when I got into graduate school and got a masters degree. And in the world of Stephanie Plum there is the Black hooker who, with Stephanie Plum's help, gets a job in cousin Vinnie's bail bond office whick gets her off the street.

The path for the middle class girl is paved and marked but for the poor girl and the working class girl, it is a deep, dark, foggy woods with no marked trails and many wolves. The trails for girls of the class I grew up in are marked to waittress jobs, factory jobs, Walmart jobs, nurses aid jobs, cleaning jobs. or other kinds of office jobs. For lower class girls it can be much harder.

Away from the mystery of the class system and back to the literary mystery genre. I just devoured those books and they saved me. They dragged my mind away from morbidity and the pathos of tragic life and death, and into the cleaned up distanced death of strangers whose deaths were going to be solved. Those mysteries had resolutions.

That's it too, the appeal, yes, people died, but there were clues and trails and if you were diligent and paid close enough attention, you could figure out the mystery and solve it!

I, who felt insecure and lost, frieghtened and weak found young outdoor girls, female detectives and lawyers, who strode fearlessly into the depths of the darkness and emerged triumphant.

It is true that in the Evanovitch novels, Stephanie Plum is often supported, saved, and seduced by hunky male characters, unlike the more modern Bennie Rosato, who fights on single handed and alone, except, like Stephanie, for the companionship of her working class and warm family and their dinner table brimming with old fashioned home-cooked meals.

If my career had begun sooner ane I had an earlier start, I could have designed and taught college level courses in literature and if I had, I would have written one for these mystery writers. Agatha Christie is the world's most successful writer even up to the latest list that I looked at which was 2018!

I never really took to the modern male authors of crime fiction like James Patterson or Harlan Coban - too gritty, too many female victims, too gloomy and misanthropic main characters - always gloomy old men 'put out to pasture' and as a last resort, recruited to come back and save the scene from the incompetent and inexperienced youngsters. I don't identify with those old guys but my brother, Neal, who does read identifies with them.

I wonder what you read, mystery visitor? wrightj45@yhaoo.com

I just called my brother and he is reading Clive Cussler and Stephen King.

Happy Trails!