When I was in my twenties, I worked as a receptionist in downtown Pittsburgh. At lunchtime I’d browse through little shops and big department stores, and I soon discovered there was a bookstore just a couple of blocks from my office. My mother had introduced me to Agatha Christie’s novels, and this bookstore had two shelves devoted to her classic paperbacks. Before long, when the phone wasn’t ringing at the reception desk, I had a Miss Marple book in front of my nose.
Five Complete Miss Marple Novels
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Then I moved to Virginia Beach. My little apartment didn’t have a TV, so I read in the evenings. A lot. There was a library a twenty-minute walk away from my job at the bank on the edge of town. Twenty minutes to walk there, and twenty minutes back, meant ten minutes of my lunch hour could be devoted to choosing the next book to read. I made the most of those ten precious minutes. I found the mystery section and sampled author after author. It was there I discovered Simon Brett and Ralph McInerny.
Simon Brett’s books were about Charles Paris, an actor who kept finding himself enmeshed in mysteries. They were all set in the world of the theater, which was foreign and fascinating to me. Even though Charles Paris drank a little too much, and didn’t seem to know when to put on the brakes when it came to women, I liked him.
Father Dowling, the detective in Ralph McInerny’s books, had his own flaws. But there was something warm about his books, and the church setting was so comforting to me. I read every one of those books I could find.
Eventually, I moved back in Pittsburgh and got to the lovely age when you look at the clock at 10:00 and think, “Hey, if I go to bed now, I can read for an hour before I fall asleep!” That’s when I discovered Kathryn Miller Haines and Ron Goulart.
Iris Anderson is the teenage heroine of Kathryn Miller Haines’s two-volume series that began with The Girl Is Murder. As Iris solves mysteries, she also unravels her family’s past. I’m a big fan of the classic movies on TCM, and I loved seeing the world of the 1940s through Iris’s eyes.
I have to say, the Ron Goulart books were a big surprise. Who would have imagined there was a Groucho Marx mystery series? The narrator and detective is actually a character named Frank Denby who meets Groucho in the 1930s in Hollywood, where they team up to solve crimes. Again, this appeals to me as a classic movie fan, but they’re also just plain fun.
So those are my favorites, as of today. I’m sure if you ask me next year, I’ll probably have another author to add to the mix!
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