One of the local used shops I frequent stocks quite a few
mysteries and has
them broken up in a variety of ways.
English Mysteries contains all the usual suspects: Agatha
Christie, Conan
Doyle and all their soft-boiled Brit relations, including the
cozies.
Then there are two other Mystery sections that I can't quite
figure out how
the owner determines which goes where: One contains
supposedly harder-edged
spy and mystery writers like David Lindsey, Lawrence Block,
John D.
McDonald, Donald Hamilton, Dan Marlowe, Max Allan Collins,
Brett Halliday,
Donald Westlake, James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett, Carter
Brown, Michael
Connelly, Clive Cussler, Ed McBain and so forth. (Although
Matt Helm sits
in this section, Edward Aarons' Sam Durrell and Philip
Atlee's Joe Gall
Gold Medal series are shelved elsewhere with the other
adventure series,
such as Mack Bolan, The Penetrator, The Destroyer, et
al.)
The second non-cozy Mystery section, which sits next to the
English Mystery
section, contains mostly P.I. novels and older (and
supposedly less
hard-boiled) writers. But the authors there don't always live
up to that
billing: Tucker Coe, Erle Stanley Gardner, Edgar Box, K.C.
Constantine,
Dorothy Hughes, Jonathan Valin, and a whole mishmash of
others, including
most of the contemporary women mystery writers like Sue
Grafton.
When I'm looking for something specific, I usually browse
both of the
non-English Mystery sections. When I once asked the owner
about the logic
behind this division, she said her experience with her
"little old lady
customers" told her they didn't want to get home with a book
that turned
out to be graphically violent -- so she tried to put the less
brutal books
by the cozies. Even she admitted that it was a tough call for
some books.
And after all, some of those little old ladies occasionally
enjoyed those
harder edged books as guilty pleasures.
Well, the little old lady who ran the shop recently sold it
to a couple who
seem to not have a lot of background in the mystery reading
arena -- for
example, I recently had to explain what a procedural is. So
as they remake
the shop into their own image, I wonder how the many mystery
sections shall
fare.
-- Duane
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