Surprising Mystery Authors

What happens when you take a write known for another genre and add mystery? Brook and Sarah discuss authors who have successfully crossed genres into mystery.

Discussed and mentioned

The Red House Mystery (1922) A.A. Milne

The Lost World (1912) Arthur Conan Doyle

Blood on the Dining Room Floor: A Murder Mystery (1948) Gertrude Stein

Tales of the Black Widowers (1964) Isaac Asimov

Holly (2023) Stephen King

Mr. Mercedes (2014) Stephen King

Misery (1987) Stephen King

Alias Grace (1996) Margaret Atwood

The Blind Assassin (2000) Margaret Atwood

The Name of the Rose (1983) Umberto Eco

J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith

Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb

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Transcript

This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.

Sarah	Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah.
Brook	And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery.
Sarah	Hi, Brook.
Brook	Hi, Sarah.
Sarah	How are you doing today?
Brook	I’m doing great and super excited to talk about mystery with you.
Sarah	As always, Brook, I feel the same. And today we are going to be talking about… ah surprising mystery authors. So. Brook, when you hear the name A.A. Milne, what do you think of?
Brook	Automatic Winnie the Pooh.
Sarah	Yeah, and and I think that’s the same for almost everybody, right? They think of much-loved Winnie the Pooh and his friends Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger and their adventures in the 100-Acre Wood.
Sarah	And those stories were incredibly popular. But did you know that Milne also wrote mystery, which… may come as a surprise to many people.
Brook	I think it is very surprising and he was in good company, wasn’t he?
Sarah	He was. And today we are going to talk about. Authors who surprise you when you learn that they have written a mystery. So, someone who is known for other work who has either written a whole series of mysteries or just as a one-off thought they would give it a try. So, I will start by talking a little bit about Milne. His Red House Mystery was published in 1922. It was initially serialized in a publication the previous year.
Sarah	And this book, The Red House Mystery, came out four years earlier than the Winnie the Pooh stories, the first collection of Winnie the Pooh stories.
Sarah	He also wrote some mystery plays. So, he had one called The Fourth Wall. And it was on the Broadway stage and ran for nine months and later became a film called The Perfect Alibi and was ah treated a couple of times by BBC in some of their productions. And what I think is really interesting about Milne is that he was one of the first members of the Detection Club.
Brook	That was just going to be my next question. Was he a member? Cause that is like at the… very beginning of The Detection Club. um So that’s super interesting to know. He was one of the beginning members.
Sarah	Yeah, and and I didn’t… uncover. Whether. I mean… He only wrote a few mysteries. He wrote obviously um a couple of collections of of Winnie the Pooh stories. I did see that certainly Christopher Robin or that character is based on his son who did not ultimately like being the center of all of that attention.
Sarah	But I got the impression that Milne himself was actually a reluctant children’s author. let’s say, and that reminded me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was… you know, of course wrote all the Sherlock Holmes stories. But that wasn’t his passion, writing, writing mystery stories or writing stories featuring Sherlock and and Watson because he wrote something called The Lost World, which is…what inspired Michael Crichton to write his own version of The Lost World, right, about the dinosaurs. um But he also wrote some other kind of action-adventurey type books. And I think that is where Doyle’s heart really was was in those, but the Sherlock stories are the ones that pay the bills.
Brook	Right. And so maybe Milne was in sort of the same boat, but it happened with children’s lit for him. But I’m interested because in my head, you know I hadn’t really looked at the publishing dates. I was thinking he was this.
Brook	successful children’s author who then decided to try his hand at mystery, I had that reversed, so that’s fun to learn.
Sarah	Mm hmm. Mm hmm. with Doyle, I think it is. The opposite. He was a mystery author. And then tried his hand at some other things and then I think he returned to Sherlock, right.
Sarah	He took that little break after after killing Sherlock off. Uh, And. Yeah, anyway, we can talk. there’s There are some other examples, I think, both of mystery authors taking on other genres. And then. authors who are known for writing. In other areas taking a crack at writing mystery. So we can talk about both of those kinds of authors today.
Brook	Yeah, and maybe why we think this is a genre that people like to dabble in because like you said, some people go on and write. an entire series. um But then sometimes it’s a one-off like bucket list project so we could maybe talk about why this is a interesting genre for them to try out.
Sarah	Yeah, I think that would be great. Um, one person who I think, and I’m just speculating here, but I think was you know one of those bucket list opportunities was Gertrude Stein. She wrote a mystery.
Brook	I had no idea. That’s so fun
Sarah	So, Gertrude Stein, who is, I think, considered kind of one of those, one of those authors of classic American literature, but she also wrote some some poetry. She did try her hand at a mystery and it was called Blood on the Dining Room Floor: A Murder Mystery.
Sarah	It was published in 1948, although she wrote it in the 1930s. And I’m not sure that… It did particularly well. I haven’t read it, but if I just look at like her Goodreads for that particular book, it’s…Three. So, you know, middle of the road kind of book.
Brook	I had no idea. But I’m telling you, I wish we would have read her murder mystery when I was in my college lit classes instead of some of the other more literary stuff, because you guys know I would much prefer to read mystery. So that’s so fascinating.
Sarah	Mm hmm. Yeah, I thought that was I thought that was really interesting as well.
Brook	While we’re on the topic of these classic authors, Isaac Asimov also wrote ah a mystery. He’s, of course, mostly known for… science fiction.
Brook	But in 1974, he released Tales of the Black Widowers. And it was a collection of these puzzle mystery stories. And I think they would be really fun to look into because number one, short stories, that’s kind of one of those. sections of mystery fiction that I don’t think gets enough attention. Uh, And you know, puzzle mysteries. from a science fiction author, I have a feeling that these would be really fascinating. And another great title.
Sarah	Yeah, that is a fantastic title. Brook, I think that that would be… um definitely worth it. Something. uh to look into.
Sarah	You know, I think I can… I don’t know I guess I can see the appeal. If you are. If you’ve been writing in a particular genre for a while, to just… try your hand at something different. Right. Even if it’s just to see what it’s like to write something that follows a different formula, let’s say, than what you traditionally write and you know Agatha Christie, we know that, she wrote a couple of romance novels. She wrote them under Mary Westmacott or publish them under Mary Westmacott as her pen name. Um so it it… you know, it’s not uncommon for people to do that.
Brook	Yeah. So, the idea of kind of a palate cleanser. um But I also think that. Mystery is unusually. technical.
Brook	Especially if maybe you’re… Maybe not compared to science fiction, but… compared to some other um genres and I think that it’s a good challenge, right? It’s a creative challenge to try this other ah genre and you know, and can I pull this off? Can I stand up with the well-known ah mystery authors out there.
Sarah	Well, and you often hear that, right? When you hear an author talking about why they’ve written a particular book, it’s because, “well, I didn’t see any mysteries that I wanted to read. And so I gave it a try.”
Brook	Yeah.
Sarah	And so maybe it’s. Maybe it’s a bit of that as well.
Brook	For sure. And there’s the satisfaction of the resolution and mystery, isn’t there? … [Sarah: Mm-hmmm] Like if you might be writing horror, which we could talk about somebody who writes horror, um or you might be writing more of this speculative fiction, the endings of those books are often very um vague or arbitrary you wonder I wonder …[Sarah: Mm-hmmm] what happened to the character.
Brook	But, to have a story where you get. you know Justice is served. good wins over evil. I don’t know. I think that it would feel really good, especially if you had been, as you say, needing a palate cleanser from something that you’ve been writing that’s more ambiguous.
Sarah	Yeah, that’s a great point. You mentioned horror, so let’s talk a little bit about Stephen King, because I think that’s who you were thinking of, who, ah you know, is a very prolific writer of pretty disturbing stories, right? And not not horror in… the slasher vein, but. really quite a lot of them a lot of them are quite psychological in their… in their horror Um, But. Yeah, he’s written he’s written quite a few mystery books .
Sarah	And I’m… not sure that… many people think of him as… a mystery author. ah But I really enjoyed the book Holly, which I think was released in 2022, or maybe it was 2023, which is a recurring character and in several of his… is his mystery books. And there is an element of like, I remember I remember listening to it. ah And there is. kind of one bit where it was a bit gruesome. and And I did kind of think, well what was I expecting? This is Stephen King.
Brook	Yeah, they’re still Stephen King, right?
Sarah	Yeah. um But ah even Misery, I think I would probably classify that as more of a mystery, right? A domestic thriller, let’s say, than some of his other works, but Holly is a private investigator and so there’s like what you would expect in in that kind of a… um that kind of a book.
Brook	Yes, that’s right. And I’ve also um seen listed Mr. Mercedes from 2014 and Finders Keepers from 2015.
Brook	King definitely likes to write mysteries and As you mentioned, even his horror. ah stories have mystery elements. So, it’s he’s one that’s a little not very surprising that he would have that crossover to me.
Brook	But someone that is surprising, maybe, perhaps, to someone is Margaret Atwood. And she’s, of course, mostly known for her speculative fiction, such as ah The Handmaid Tale. and But she has written… at least a couple of mysteries. Alias Grace, which I have not read, but I have watched the Netflix miniseries. It was really good. That was the 1996 book that she wrote and then also The Blind Assassin from 2000.
Sarah	Yeah, I agree. I think Attwood is not someone that you immediately associate. with mystery.
Brook	Mm hmm. I think when you have somebody who is not writing commercial fiction. And they… delve into it. that’s that becomes more surprising than, say, King, who we just mentioned. And also… J.K. Rowling, who writes as Robert Galbraith and has a long running series, the Cormoran Strike series. um Definitely Harry Potter is not a mystery. Although it has a lot of mystery um elements, I would say.
Sarah	I think I would push back, Brook, and I would say at least the first couple of books are mysteries.
Brook	Yeah, you’re right. There are mysteries contained in the larger story, aren’t there? But it’s not very hard of a stretch to think from where you go from um Harry Potter to a mystery series. Although the jump to a PI series is a little farther than say if she had chosen an amateur sleuth.
Sarah	I, I agree with that. So not only is she writing a different a different genre, but she’s writing for a different audience.
Brook	Very true. Very true. Is she the first one we’ve spoken of so far? I think so, who has chosen a pen name, which is something else that someone might do if their genre crossing is to keep those separate and, maybe she chose to do that because just like you say, Harry Potter is going to be that middle grade audience versus Robert Galbraith stories, which would be adult mysteries.
Sarah	Mm-hmm. Yeah, and… and another author that I can think of that uses a pen name is Nora Roberts, who… that name um is really associated with kind of romance ah novels, where as J.D. Robb, she’s writing uh police procedurals.
Brook	Right. And another one who has done a very long running series. So definitely mystery and romance are both, you know, mainstays to her career.
Sarah	Mm hmm. Mm hmm. One other author that I might add to this list is someone who was an academic, philosopher. Umberto Eco, who in 1980 published the Italian version of The Name of the Rose, and then it was translated and published in English in 1983. So, this is a medieval historical mystery. Um, that I think has, you know, some philosophical elements and and kind of exploration of some some pretty big themes. But it is consistently listed as one of… like the top mysteries of all time.
Brook	It is. Definitely. If you look up, you know “classic mysteries that I should read. you know, in my lifetime.” It’s going to be on the list. And was that a one-off, Sarah? No more mysteries?
Sarah	Yeah, Brook, I think that um The Name of the Rose was the only mystery that that he wrote. It wasn’t the only piece of fiction, I think, but ah, certainly the mystery that he is most well known for.
Brook	Mm-hmm well and to make that sort of best of list. Too bad he didn’t keep going.
Sarah	Yeah, it’s… It’s interesting because I think it was. An overwhelming success. at the time. It was released before I was. Before I was reading mysteries, so um I can’t speak from, from firsthand But, from what I’ve read, it looks like it was incredibly popular and they’re was a film adaptation that um followed shortly after the English release. I think the film, maybe it was 1986 or 1987 when it was released. um And that stars Sean Connery and Christian Slater among others. And as you say, on these top best of mystery lists and it’s sold millions of copies. So, maybe it was a case of him not being sure if he could reproduce that success. [Brook: Mm hmmm.] Because I think… when you have that you know initial response like that it’s probably pretty overwhelming to try and think you know to think about trying to replicate that.
Brook	It would be, definitely.
Sarah	Well, Brook, this has been really interesting to chat about. surprising mystery authors and maybe something we can just keep track of because you know,
Sarah	As you say, there’s… you know, an appeal to writing mystery. And I’m sure that the people that we’ve just spoken about are not the last to give it a try.
Brook	Absolutely. And maybe we mentioned some books that you’d like to put on your reading list, everyone. But until next time. Thank you for joining us on Clued in Mystery. I’m Brook.
Sarah	And I’m Sarah. And we both love mystery.