British Mystery Writers

[Liz]

I started reading Dorothy Sayers' "Lord Peter Wimsey" mysteries because they were running on Masterpiece Theatre, but I have read all of them now, and all the Harriet Vane books too, because I like the philosophizing, quotations, and banter as much as I like the stories. My cousin says she can't stand them, they spend too much time talking and not enough time detecting! I also like the characters and the way they are drawn; they are easy to visualise and are like old friends when I meet up with them in the next book.

I have also read a lot of P.D. James, but her stories sometimes drive me nutz - so many times nobody did it, or everybody did it, or half the murders are solved halfway through the book and then the Copycat strikes - except for Inspector Dalgliesh, her books are more "puzzle stories" than real mysteries.

Campion only started working for me when I saw him played by Peter Davidson. Now I enjoy the stories very much, but before that I could not visualise him at all from the description that was given in Allingham's novels.

The most disappointing writer in this genre I have encountered is Josephine Tey. Her "Brat Farrar" was a fabulous book and the characters, particularly the protagonist, were almost hyper-real; the story was interesting and there was no mystery except to the other characters, there was just a race to see if he would reveal the truth before he was found out or killed. Every book I have read by her since then has been dreck. She seems to forget she's writing a mystery until she gets halfway through the book, and then suddenly in come a lot of characters you never saw before with motivations nobody ever had, and badabing badabang the mystery is solved and that's the end and please drive safely on the way home. And I shake my head and wonder how on earth she got anybody to pay her to write those things!

What kind of mystery writing do you like and who do you recommend?