Murder Most Memorable — Books

I became an avid reader at a tender young age. It was inevitable with a mother who read bedtime stories to me from the classics and spent most of her free time with her nose in a book. When I was younger, Mom’s favorite escapist genre was mystery, particularly those of Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dorothy Sayers, John Creasy, and of course, that Queen of murder mystery, Agatha Christie.

While Mom’s reading was mostly murder back in those days, I was already dashing through a myriad of genres from biography to fantasy by the time I was in second grade. My first mysteries were, probably unsurprisingly, the Nancy Drew mysteries. I also read Trixie Belden, Cherry Ames, The Happy Hollisters, The Boxcar Children, and many of Phyllis A. Whitney’s children’s mysteries, among others.

I had to have been eleven when I read my first “adult” mystery. I saw the title of Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party in a stack of library books my mom brought home and I just had to read it. This Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver novel about the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl may not have been Christie’s best, but I liked it then and I still do.

The next book I read was Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons, which takes place at a girl’s school. After that, I was off on the quest to read everything Dame Agatha wrote.

And with that, we come to the crux of this story

While there are a few I haven’t really liked, I have enjoyed reading just about all of the fictional murder stories I’ve encountered. However, there are some that I can return to again and again.

Even though I know whodunit in these stories, I’m never bored with them. It’s not necessarily because they are high-quality writing or particularly exciting adventures. It’s because they are cozy. They make me feel happy. I like looking for things I missed the last time I read it.

Mostly, though, the two real reasons I love to come back to these tales are these: they make me reminisce about the days when I first encountered them or they give me a feeling of beauty and familiarity. I know the characters. I recognize the landscape.

Twenty Books

• Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie
• Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie
• Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
• The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie
• Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
• The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie
• Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie
• Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie
• Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie
• A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters
• The Virgin in the Ice by Ellis Peters
• The Leper of St. Giles by Ellis Peters
• Death by Darjeeling by Laura Childs
• The Jasmine Moon Murder by Laura Childs
• Of Books and Bagpipes by Paige Shelton
• The Cracked Spine by Paige Shelton
• The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart
• The Yellow Room by Mary Roberts Rinehart
• The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart
• Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs

You’ll note that many of these are by the same authors. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that I’ve been reading their work for a good part of my life and reading them is like a homecoming of sorts. Another is that once I read one of their books, I wanted more. I haven’t read everything these authors have written, yet — not even Agatha Christie. Nevertheless, I’ve come back to these titles more than once because there was something in the story that caught me.

Sometimes I just come back to them because I want something I can get lost in, something that doesn’t demand a great depth of thought, something I can curl up with on a lazy day. Murder mysteries aren’t always my choice, but when they are, these are some of my go-to’s.

Do you have a list of books you can re-read and still enjoy?

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This story first appeared in Bouncin and Behavin Blogs on Medium