Edmund Wilson famously, and crankily, asked who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd. But I, over forty years of working with professional journalists, returned home late at night to a comfortable chair, a good light, a strong drink, and a book in which disagreeable people meet violent death.
I got through Conan Doyle as a child and from high school on went through Rex Stout's entire Nero Wolfe canon, which showed me how detective stories work.
They are comedies: We begin in an ordered world, a disruption occurs, the detective penetrates to the source of disorder, and a form of order is restored. Nero Wolfe sits at his desk reading, eats gourmet meals, tends to his rooftop orchids. A client appears, and Wolfe sends his sidekick, Archie Goodwin, out to investigate. (The contrasting Wolfe-Goodwin personalities add variety and humor to the plot.) Wolfe exposes the murderer with his analytical mind, and we leave him and Goodwin in his brownstone back to his books, his orchids, and his fancy dishes.
Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret stories are similar. Maigret smokes his pipes in his office, goes to the brasserie for a drink, talks to people, penetrates the psychology of the crime, returns to his pipes and beers. Amid disorder, routines persist and are sustained.
I've read a great many of these series over the years and am looking for something new. Let me list some of the detective authors and characters I've most enjoyed, and perhaps you can suggest something along the same lines.
P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh, Tony Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Robert B. Parker's Spenser (though the series thinned out toward the end), Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse, Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, Stewart Kaminsky's Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov, Reginald Hill's Andrew Dalziel, Andrew Vachss's Burke, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, Jan Willem van der Wetering's Grijpstra and de Gier, Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti, Jane Haddam's Gregor Demarkian, John Sandford's Lucas Davenport, Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch. (It may look as if I have read nothing else, but I assure my reading logs show otherwise.)
I never cottoned much to Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. (Sorry.) I read Elizabeth George until she became ponderous and Patricia Cornwell until she turned into a self-parody. I loved Ed McBain's 87th Precinct procedurals, and I like the literary better than the thriller.
Now it's your turn. Which detective series give you pleasure, and, if it's not too much to ask, why?
And yes, I am aware of Louise Penny.
