oz_mystery_readers 5 years old today

Back on 9 Feb 2003, when had I tried and tasted a number of online book discussion groups, and not found any that really did what I wanted, which was to discuss murder mystery books available in Australia, I decided to launch out and create one. I had already floated the idea with friends in a face-to-face group here in Adelaide, and so oz_mystery_readers was born.

I advertised the group among friends and email lists and it gradually grew. As happens with such groups, membership changes over time with people subscribing and unsubscribing. Some people get overwhelmed by email as a group grows, go "nomail" and promptly forget the group exists, others get the digest of daily mails, while still others just lurk.
oz_mystery_readers has really grown very slowly, but I'd guess that over time about twice as many have subscribed as are members now.
It helps also to develop a strong core of active members, which I believe we have now, and also for others to take on tasks in the group, whether it be as co-moderators or as discussion leaders.

I thought a lot about the good and bad features of other groups that I'd joined and left, and of those I'd stayed with. I must admit that a much larger US group 4MA that I discovered after I'd created oz_mystery_readers has been a constant source of inspiration and a good model of what a group can be like.

Some statistics:
Currently there are 117 members (but among them are 15 "bouncing" email addresses)
Between us, over 5 years, we have generated 9765 messages
June 2007 was our most "active" month with 418 messages - that is just over 10 a day.
Since beginning regular scheduled book discussions in December 2004 we have discussed 46 books.

We rate all discussion books and our top 10 books, in order, have been
On 5.0 (maximum points)
RAVEN BLACK by Ann Cleeves,
and DIAMOND DOVE by Adrian Hyland
then
ABOVE SUSPICION by Lynda La Plante (4.75)
Then on 4.7
FLESHMARKET CLOSE by Ian Rankin
SLEEPYHEAD by Mark Billingham
FLESH AND BLOOD by John Harvey
RED LEAVES by Thomas H. Harris
THE BROKEN SHORE by Peter Temple
On 4.6
THE DEVIL'S STAR by Jo Nesbo
NO TRACE by Barry Maitland

Our discussion books are suggested and voted on by members.
We have selection criteria for the books:
January: General suggestion
February: Non-British, Non-Australian writer
March: 1-10 General suggestion
24-30 Quiz an Author: we ask an author to join us
April: Awards month
1-10 Ned Kelly winner for best crime novel for previous year
21-30 a prize winner - the book must have won a prize
for crime/mystery fiction in the last 5 years.
May: General suggestion
June: British crime - British author or British setting or both
July: General suggestion
August: Classics month - the book should be written by a writer considered a "classic" - e.g. Agatha Christie, Simenon, Arthur Upfield, Dorothy L. Sayers
September: 1-10 General suggestion
24-30 Quiz an Author: we ask an author to join us
October: Australian writer in an Australian setting
November: General suggestion
December: Christmas, set in and around Christmas

As well as the scheduled discussions, we have a number of regular weekly activities such as Friday Recommendation, Telling Title, Peeves, Middle of the Month, Author Chat, and Who Have you Met?
At the end of each month we encourage members to tell others what they've read in the last month, with title, author, short description and rating if they've kept that much detail.
These lists are great sources of suggestions for books to look out for or avoid.

We have an activity called Quiz an Author which takes place approximately every 3 months. Our guest for a week is an Australian author who is asked to answer a mixture of pre-set and spontaneous questions.
So far our guests have been
Brian Kavanagh - author of CAPABLE OF MURDER, THE EMBROIDERED CORPSE, and recently released BLOODY HAM
P. D. Martin - author of BODY COUNT, THE MURDERERS CLUB, and recently released FAN MAIL
Adrian Hyland - author of DIAMOND DOVE (aka MOONLIGHT DOWNS), winner of the Ned Kelly best First Novel award in 2007
Our guest on 17 February will be multiple award winner Gabrielle Lord. Author of 15 books published since 1980. Books to think about: DEATH DELIGHTS, DIRTY WEEKEND and SHATTERED.

Our reading/discussion schedule for the coming months
March
1-10, EXIT MUSIC by Ian Rankin
April: Awards Month
1-10, 2007 Ned Kelly Award Winner: Best Novel
CHAIN OF EVIDENCE by Garry Disher
21-30, 2007 Duncan Lawrie International Dagger Award
WASH THIS BLOOD CLEAN FROM MY HAND by Fred Vargas

Despite the fact that this group is an Australian one, and we do promote Australian murder mystery and crime fiction, we don't read/discuss exclusively that as you can see, and our members come from all over the world.
So if you are looking for a group to join, why not oz_mystery_readers?

THE RISK OF DARKNESS, Susan Hill

THE RISK OF DARKNESS is #3 in Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler series, and in many ways a continuation of THE PURE IN HEART. That fact causes problems in writing even a short review, because I don't want to spoil THE PURE IN HEART for those who have still to read it.

THE RISK OF DARKNESS could certainly be read on its own, but I have seen comments where people say it has sent them scurrying back to find the two preceding novels.

One concept that I thought Hill explored really well in this novel was that of the impact on victims of crime - the impact on those whose loved one has been killed or has disappeared, and the impact on relatives of the person who committed the crime.

What also comes over really well is that no detective works in a social vacuum - they too have family, ambitions, and emotional quagmires.

As she did in the two earlier novels, Hill leaves threads and questions, un-resolved, that will probably carry over into the next. New characters come onto the scene, and Hill, seemingly without a qualm, ditches others who have been with us throughout.

The one constant in all novels is Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler, at times a frustratingly flawed character, sometimes blind-sided by his own emotional needs, and often insensitive to how others might feel, but always concerned with active detection.

Simon Serrailler series in order:
THE VARIOUS HAUNTS OF MEN (2004), my rating: 4.6
THE PURE IN HEART (2005), my rating: 4.7
THE RISK OF DARKNESS (2006), my rating: 4.7

To be published in 2008
THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN
VOWS OF SILENCE

Susan Hill's website: http://www.susan-hill.com/
Her blog: http://blog.susan-hill.com/blog/index.xml

Tim Hallinan

I'm reading Tim Hallinan's first Poke Rafferty novel A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART, so I thought I'd do some research about the author. He has such a quirky sense of humour, which just comes through in the phrases he uses and the way the central character Poke Rafferty talks about himself, that he almost comes across as an Australian writer. His style certainly reminds me a lot of Kel Robertson. But Tim was born in California.

Some people will know of Tim as the author of Simon Grist series
http://www.ncteamericancollection.org/litmap/hallinan_tim_ca.htm
including
EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL (1990)
INCINERATOR (1992)
THE MAN WITH NO TIME (1993)
THE BONE POLISHER (1995)

So I'm not going to tell you much aboutA NAIL THROUGH THE HEART here, except to say it is set in Bangkok where Poke appears to have been living for some time, and there is an Australian connection in the book.

In his writer's section Tim has this to say

A long time ago, something funny happened to me.

I thought I was a writer. I thought I was a writer because I had begun three novels over the course of a few years, noodling on each of them every time inspiration struck, which wasn’t often. (More about inspiration later.) But still, I thought of myself as a writer – all I had to do was finish one of those books.

And then my house burned down. Naturally, I had backups of all my unfinished novels, and naturally, they were all in the house. I had a life-changing revelation: If I had finished those books, they'd probably exist somewhere – in print, or at a publisher, or in a box in the garage. And then I had a second revelation: whatever I was, I wasn't a novelist, because I hadn't finished a novel.

So I made some notes on the book I remembered best, flew to Thailand, and wrote the whole thing in seven weeks. And it got me an agent, and then a three-book contract, which led to another three-book contract, etc. In other words, finishing the book turned me into a writer.

The end result of that journey was A NAIL IN THE HEART and now the second book in the series THE FOURTH WATCHER is about to be published. More later when hopefully I've finished ANTTH.

See for yourself: http://www.timothyhallinan.com/

Schützenfest in Adelaide - German crime fiction

We are off to the Schützenfest today. Lovely weather- mid 20s - and my family plays in the Klemzig Oompah band. See more at Schützenfest website.

It occurred to me though how little German crime fiction I have read - almost none really - so perhaps people can suggest some I can look out for.

I know there are writers of German crime and mystery fiction because when I was last in Germany I visited a number of bookshops looking for books in English, of which there were very few. But the crime sections were always very large, some translated from English, but obviously lots of German writers too. Perhaps they just don't get translated into English.

So what have I read?
Last year oz_mystery_readers discussed THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD by John Le Carre. Not German I know, but about the cold war days, before the wall came down. I have been to Germany both before and after the Berlin Wall came down. Two years ago prosperity and commercialism were beginning to seep into the east.
Regarded as a classic in spy thrillers. Alec Leamas, for 4 years head of British espionage in Berlin, loses yet another double agent, when a spy crossing from East Berlin is shot by the border guards. He returns to London a broken man and Control offers him a final chance, one last task, to get back at Mundt, the head of East German espionage whom he holds responsible for the lost agents. Leamus has to appear to be discarded in order to become attractive to East German intelligence and open to defection. The story in this relatively short novel has so many twists and turns that you don’t really see what will happen at the end until it actually happens, and then you understand that this is where everything was leading all the time.

A couple of years ago we discussed STRAIGHT INTO DARKNESS by Faye Kellerman. Again not a German writer I know.
Axel Berg is an Inspektor in Munich's newly formed Mordkommission. The year is 1929 and the Austrian Adolf Hitler is on the rise. He leads those who want to rid Germany of degenerates, Jews, Communists. The police force that Berg belongs to is underpaid and corrupt and ill equipped to deal with the growing Brown Shirt menace, young drunken hooligans who are manipulated by Hitler and muder and attack 'degenerates'. Lustmord — the joy of murder. The terrifying concept seems apt for the brutal slaying of a beautiful young society wife dumped in the vast English Garden. Homicide inspector Axel Berg is horrified by the crime...and disturbed by the artful arrangement of the victim's clothes and hair — a madman's portrait of death. Berg's superiors demand quick answers and a quick arrest: a vagrant, the woman's husband, anyone who can be demonized will do. When a second body is discovered, the city erupts into panic, the unrest fomented by the wild-eyed, hate-mongering Austrian Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirt party of young thugs. Berg can trust no one as he relentlessly hunts a ruthless killer, dodging faceless enemies and back-alley intrigue, struggling to bring a fiend to justice before the country — and his life — veer straight into darkness.

A couple of years ago I reviewed BROTHER GRIMM by Craig Russell, interesting because it was published simultaneously in English and German, as, I think, at least one later book was.
A girl's body has turned up on a Hamburg beach with a note concealed in her hand. The note gives her name, that of a 13 year old who went missing on her way home from school 3 years earlier. But it is not the same girl. Fabel has worked this out even before her parents come to identify the body and confirm his suspicions. Then two more bodies turn up, posed at a picnic table in the woods, also with notes concealed in their hands. The notes say Hansel and Gretel, in the same tiny, obsessively neat writing.
For English-language readers BROTHER GRIMM is basically a police procedural in a different setting. There are a few differences in the police hierarchy and methods but basically I think this is a book that could be set anywhere. Having said that, great pains have been taken to relate to the German audience. The book was released simultaneously in English and as a German translation. The setting of BROTHER GRIMM is very Germanic. I don't think I will ever look at Grimm's fairy tales in quite the same way again. It helps if the reader has a passing knowledge of the best-known of them.

And I have to mention.. one of the first books I ever wrote a 'proper' review for
THE MASK OF ATREUS by A.J. Hartley
There are really two beginning points for this thriller/mystery. In the dying days of World War Two, a German tank convoy escorting a truck is intercepted by an American platoon. In the skirmish that follows most of the Germans are killed and the rest flee leaving the truck behind. Inside the truck is a single crate stencilled with the German eagle and swastika. The contents of this crate are pivotal to the rest of the story. The story then leaps to the present day. At 3 am Deborah Miller, curator of a small private museum in Atlanta, Georgia, is awoken by her third strange phone call for the night. This one sends her hurrying back to the museum which she had left only just after midnight after a successful promotional evening. At the museum, in a room she did not even know existed, she finds the body of Richard Dixon, her mentor and the museum's founder and director. On the shelves around the room is a treasure trove of what seem to be genuine Mycenaean antiquities. The reader unravels the mystery, essentially the story of why Richard was killed, in THE MASK OF ATREUS through Deborah's eyes, travelling to Greece and Russia, patching together an incredible story.

So what can you add to my TBF (to be found) list? Not that I need more to read, you understand.

Missing Children

I am currently reading THE PURE IN HEART by Susan Hill. #2 in the Simon Serrailler series. The first real case in the book is the apparent kidnapping of a 9 year old boy as he stands on the footpath outside his home waiting for his ride to school.
And as Serrailler's assistant Detective Sergeant Nathan Coates thinks..
What can it be like to go out one morning and everything's hunky-dory, and at the end of the day, wham, your kid's gone, just... gone? Jesus.

Lying in bed last night, I started thinking about books that I've read that tackled this theme. A mental trawl of my database brought up these..

INVOLUNTARY WITNESS by Gianrico Carofiglio
Not an optimistic one because the boy is found dead and so the book is about the attempt to lay the blame.
A Senegalese peddlar working on the beaches of Bari in southern Italy has been accused of the murder of a young boy, whose body was found down a well 12 kilometers away. Guido Guerrieri, Counsel for the Defence, originally advises the accused to opt for a "short trial", a method in which the accused basically pleads guilty and gets a reduced sentence because of that. But the accused says he is not guilty and although he thinks the case is hopeless Guido also believes him. This novel is an Italian prize winner, translated into English. It is Carofiglio's debut novel, won a number of literary awards, and also already become the basis for an Italian TV series. Very different view of Italian justice system to Donna Leon. But then Bari is not Venice.

Then of course IN THE WOODS by Tana French
Three 12 years olds are playing in the woods at Knocknaree and then there is one. The other two vanish and the remaining child Adam Ryan is in a catatonic state and remembers nothing. Life goes on but the two children are never found and Adam Ryan becomes detective Rob Ryan. Twenty years on the woods are to be demolished to make way for a motorway. When protesters assert that the woods are of archaelogical significance they are given time to excavate and to retrieve anything of value. Then the body of a young girl is found near the excavation site, and Rob Ryan is part of the team assigned the case. He knows he should declare his conflict of interest but he doesn't. Gradually as the investigation develops the layers of his memory onion peel back and he gets closer to the truth. A strong debut novel that tackles an idea others have tackled before

BLACK SECONDS by Karin Fossum
Helga Joner has often thought that her nine year old daughter Ida is too good to be true, too good to last. The disappearance of a child is every parent’s worst nightmare. When Ida fails to arrive home from the shop, Helga feels she had been rehearsing the moment for years. First Helga and her sister Ruth scour the streets where they might find Ida, without success, and then they ring the police. Helga feels that somehow she has tempted fate, setting off an inevitable chain of events.
When Inspector Konrad Sejer arrives at her house, Helga feels instinctively that he will find Ida. As time passes Sejer becomes concerned that no trace has been found of Ida or the bright yellow bicycle she rode to the shop. One hundred and fifty volunteers search for Ida without success. Eight days later there are still no clues, the search is to be scaled down, and a chance comment by Helga to Sejer gives them something new to work on.

from a couple of years back in my reading
NO TRACE by Barry Maitland
In this work Maitland turns his focus on an artistic community where one of the leading artists, Gabriel Rudd, has won England’s most controversial art awards, the Turner Prize, with a painting he completed after the death of his wife. Now his daughter has disappeared, and two other young girls have also gone missing at the same time. Rudd begins to work on an art installation based on the grief he is experiencing for his lost daughter Tracey.

and ON BEULAH HEIGHT by Reginald Hill
Andy Dalziel's worst case was when 3 little girls went missing at Dendale, a small community where a dam was being built. They were never found and Benny Lightfoot, the man suspected of their disappearance, disappeared without trace too. The valley was flooded and the crime was never solved. Most of the families moved into a neighbouring valley, and now, 15 years on, another little girl has gone missing. But little Betsy Lightfoot had survived 15 years ago, and now she has come back to the area. She was 7 years old when Dendale was drowned. And it seems too that Benny is back.

Peter Temple comes out tops

If you add the oz_mystery readers best reads for 2006 and 2007 together an interesting picture emerges
The top 5 are
BROKEN SHORE (THE), Peter Temple, 4+6
DIAMOND DOVE, Adrian Hyland, 5
DEVIL'S STAR (THE), Jo Nesbo, 3+2
RAVEN BLACK, Ann Cleeves, 1+3
ABOVE SUSPICION, Lynda La Plante, 4

Top by a long way is THE BROKEN SHORE with which Peter Temple has won the Ned Kelly award for Best Novel in 2006, and then the 2007 CWA Duncan Lawrie Award

oz_mystery_readers best for 2007

oz_mystery_readers follow the same practice as many online groups of asking members to submit their 10 or so best reads for the year. The results are than collated to give members books to look out for.

Here is the short list for 2007 of those that were mentioned more than once.
In all 112 titles were submitted by a dozen or so list members
The numbers after the authors names indicate the number of times the title occurred
*** indicate Australian authors

*** DIAMOND DOVE, Adrian Hyland, 5

ABOVE SUSPICION, Lynda La Plante, 4

*** BROKEN SHORE (THE), Peter Temple, 4

*** CROOK AS ROOKWOOD, Chris Nyst, 3

DEATH OF DALZIEL (THE), Reginald Hill, 3

DEVIL'S STAR (THE), Jo Nesbo, 3

*** BODY COUNT, P. D. Martin, 2

EXIT MUSIC, Ian Rankin, 2

HOUSE SITTER (THE), Peter Lovesey, 2

*** NIGHT FERRY (THE), Michael Robotham, 2

PRIEST, Ken Bruen, 2

REDBREAST (THE), Jo Nesbo, 2

SILENCE OF THE GRAVE, Arnaldur Indridason, 2

TIN ROOF BLOW DOWN (THE), James Lee Burke, 2

VOICES, Arnaldur Indridason, 2

WOODS (THE), Harlan Coben, 2

Some authors were mentioned more than once too
- more than one title that is

==============================

Alexander McCall Smith

Arnaldur Indridason

*** Brian Kavanagh

Colin Watson

Giles Blunt

Hakan Nesser

Harlan Coben

Karin Fossum

Ken Bruen

Louise Penny

Lynda La Plante

Peter Lovesey

*** Shane Maloney

Tess Gerritsen

Thomas H. Cook