Week 3 - Mysteries - Thoughts on the Reading

Curious that the chapter is called Crime rather than Mystery.

I thought the factoid that estimates are that crime fiction constitutes 1/3 of all fiction published worldwide. We know it's very circ in our library. We're rearranging our fiction and genre fiction collections in our library. For the genres, I'm putting mysteries right up front so they're the first genre people will see -- right now westerns and sci fi are the first tow genres you see.

Reading this chapter was fun and like old home week since my fiction reading is 90% mystery. (I'm hoping this class will encourage me to change this %) I started with Nancy Drew and never looked back!

The cozy - I'd say that Christie and Sayers, to a lesser extent, are still popular in our library. I think Sayers is known due to TV series of her works several years ago. I think we would do well to identify and popularize cozies now or whatever term we would use - cozy is almost too old-fashioned a term. I do have readers who want to stay away from too much violence/blood, creepiness, societal issues--drugs, pron, abuse as plotlines, vicous serial murderers . . . I think of series like the one featuring Maxie and Stretch as a modern "cozy"

Character, setting and other appeals factors resonated with me as a reader and a RA librarian. I do think the growth in hobby mysteries has helped explode the readership. It's one of the good talking points with readers too . . . as they ask for a cooking mystery, you can talk about the author and the recipes and get into a nice conversation. What I find too that if you are talking about books rather than recommending a book (more of a chat than a RA interview with a customer), the customer will often recommend a book or a series to you so I think that is a positive experience for the customer . . . that she or he and the librarian are
readers sharing their love of reading.

So, for me the mystery chapter was enjoyable to read rather than a lesson . . . I didn't take any notes.

Somewhere though in this class, in this chapter or in the discussion, I read about how frequently readers will refer to the characters rather than the author and maybe not remember the plot too well over time, that resonates with me . . . and above I refer to Maxie and Stretch, the characters rather than the titles or author by name!!!!


Discussion forum questions:
If you were book-talking mysteries to a group of people who weren't mystery readers, how would you explain the appeal?

If you weren't a mystery reader before this, did reading your book change your impressions of the genre? Was it what you expected?

If you are a mystery reader, could you see the mechanics (not that this is mechanical writing!) of the conventions of the genre within the book you read?

Did the author stretch or exceed the conventions? How so?