Reading the Detectives discussion

Judy wrote: "Welcome, Colin, glad you found us! Thanks for the Carr suggestion, I'll give The Hollow Man a try."
Hi Judy,nice to meet you!

Susan wrote: "Hi Colin - glad you found us. I am a HUGE Christie fan :)"
Hi Susan,nice to meet you!

Jan C wrote: "Colin wrote: "Hi all,glad to be here!
I'm a big fan of Agatha Christie of course,but my favourite author is John Dickson Carr.He is American of course,but his novels are so quintessentially English..."
Hi Jan,thanks for the recommendation,sounds interesting,i'll check it out.

Hello everyone, I'm Mallika from Gurgaon, India and joined this group since I saw many of my favourite authors here- AC, especially but also Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers as well. Have also read some Tey, Dickson Carr, Van Dine, Stout, JS Fletcher, and the Inspector Sloan books. What fun it is to find this group.

Hi Mallika,welcome aboard!

Hi Mallika, welcome to the group! Glad you found us :)

Welcome, Mallika, that's a great selection of favourite authors. Glad you found the group!

Judy wrote: "Welcome, Mallika, that's a great selection of favourite authors. Glad you found the group!"

Thank you all! I look forward to some fun discussions.

Welcome, Lelly, glad you found the group. That's a great list of favourite authors and detectives! Must admit I haven't read all of those you mentioned yet, but hope to do so.

Welcome, Lelly. I am currently reading my way through P D James and have tried most of the authors you mention - I keep meaning to get to Phil Rickman and may do so after reading all of Sayers and James.

Hi I'm Deb and fell in love with mysteries as a child. I have too many favorites to mention here, but I look forward to participating.

Welcome Deb.

Welcome, Deb, glad you found us!

Hey, all, I'm Rebecca. A coworker led me to this group, and it looks like this kind of discussion is right up my alley! My favorite authors of the time period are Sayers and Tey, and I've also read a fair bit of Allingham and Marsh, as well as Stout, Van Dine, and Queen on the American side. My fave that nobody's heard of is Clayton Rawson, who was a stage magician and wrote a couple of series with magician detectives. I look forward to catching up with the Sayers reread!

Welcome Becca. I just joined too, it looks like we will have great fun here.

Hi, everybody - I'm Tracey; I was looking for a place to talk Sayers, and here the group was! I've been reading Lord Peter almost annually since I was a teenager. I love the Golden Age: Tey, Crispin, Allingham, and Christie of course. Netgalley has been feeding the addiction lately as a few publishers are reissuing books by writers I never heard of before.

Welcome Tracey. You should feel at home here. We read all those people. Getting ready to read Tey's The Man in the Queue.

Welcome Deborah, Becca and Tracey. Hope you enjoy the group!

Welcome, Becca and Tracey, glad you both joined.

Becca, I'd never heard of Clayton Rawson but he sounds intriguing - I love the fact that his series is called the Great Merlini mysteries! But his books look hard to get hold of - maybe one of the publishers reprinting Golden Age books will pick him up.

Judy, that would be a very cool thing. The Merlini novels and a couple from Rawson's other series with Don Diavolo are available as ebooks from Open Road Media, at least in the US, but I'm not sure how the international rights work (or don't work, as the case may be).

Ho, I'm Chiara from Italy, I am so happy to have found this group as I am a great fan of Christie 's but I would like to explore detective literature a lot more.

Hi Chiara - welcome to the group :)

Hi Chiara, glad you joined. We're enjoying exploring detective stories in the group.

Hi, I'm Joanne from Seattle, and I just discovered this group, mentioned in another group's discussion. I love reading police procedurals, especially, and classic British mysteries. I've been rereading Christie's Poirot books and really enjoying them; they're also fun to listen to as audiobooks. Other favorite authors are Lovesey, Rendell, Tey, Sayers, and Crispin. I'm looking forward to joining in the discussions. Happy to be here! Joanne

Welcome, Joanne. I also like Lovesey and Tey, among others.

Hi Joanne, glad you joined us :)

Welcome Joanne, great selection of favourite authors there!

Hello everyone! I am geeky uk based student who is an avid reader of fantasy mystery and sci-fi.

Hi Thomas, welcome to the group!

Welcome, Thomas! Glad you've joined the group.

Tracey wrote: "Hi, everybody - I'm Tracey; I was looking for a place to talk Sayers, and here the group was! I've been reading Lord Peter almost annually since I was a teenager. I love the Golden Age: Tey, Crispi..."

Hi Tracey! Glad you found us :)

And welcome to all the other new members too!

Hi! Newbie alert! I'm Karen from Ohio and have been a mystery fan since childhood. I'm a retired librarian and my first job was working in a public library at the circulation desk where I discovered most of the classic mystery writers as some of our patrons checked them out.

I have a huge list of authors that I love, Including Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Crispen, Ngaio Marsh, Patricia Wentworth, Catherine Aird. Recently, I've fallen in love with ER Punshon and Harriet Rutland in classic mysteries. In terms of non-classic mysteries, I'm also a huge fan of Peter Robinson (DCI Banks), Rhys Bowen (Evan Evans series), Ben Aaronovitch, Peter Lovesey (Sgt. Cribb), William Marshall (Yellowthread Street mysteries), Elizabeth George, Donna Leon, and Archer Mayor ( Joe Gunther series; for the lone American detective on my lists!). I also love the Frances and Richard Lockridge -- I consider them American classics.

I was over in the English Mysteries Club group when I found out about this group and so far I'm loving what I'm seeing here. Wish I'd found you all in January for the Sayers Challenge. I'm going to be playing catch-up now.

Hi Karen, so glad you found us! Welcome to the group - that's a great list of favourite authors. I'm a fan of Sayers and Allingham in particular - there are some of the others you mention who I haven't read yet, so will bear those suggestions in mind.

A few of us here recently read the first Punshon Bobby Owen mystery and I'm really looking forward to more of those - also just read and loved my first Patricia Wentworth.

Hi Karen - welcome to the group :)

Thanks for the welcome Judy and Susan!

Hello All,

I'm excited to start reading Five Red Herrings this coming month but this whole series (and to an extent, the genre) is new to me.

I would, however, like to know whether this book stands alone or if I would be much better served if I started reading the first book in the Lord Peter Wimsey series and worked my way up gradually from there.

Thanks!!!

Auri, I very much prefer to read a series in order, but that is a personal thing. I would say that "Five Red Herrings," stands alone; although I have to say it was not my favourite of the Wimsey books so far. Still, I hope you do give the Wimsey books a try, wherever you decide to start and I am sure that some of our members will give you helpful advice.

Thanks Susan. I think I might just start with the first in the series if this isn't one of the better specimen. Appreciate your perspective.

Susan wrote: "Auri, I very much prefer to read a series in order, but that is a personal thing. I would say that "Five Red Herrings," stands alone; although I have to say it was not my favourite of the Wimsey bo..."

The first book is quite short and introduces some important characters, so you could maybe read that one and then jump into this months read?

Hi everyone! I enjoy Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Rex Stout and on and on. I have just started listening to a podcast called "Classic Mysteries"' all about Golden Age mysteries, which has added to my TBR list considerably (and enjoyably). I belong to two book groups, one concentrating on current works, fiction and non-fiction, the other on "the classics" (The Iliad, To Kill a Mockingbird, Jane Eyre etc.). I was looking for a group dedicated to the older mysteries - new "cozies" and more gritty mysteries (Lee Child, etc.) are not really to my taste despite my best efforts. Looking forward to this group - especially to the Dorothy Sayers challenge and also to other authors I haven't found on my own. (By coincidence, I just finished The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne.)

Welcome Phyllis. I know I like everyone on your list.

Welcome to the group, Phyllis. How lucky you just read, The Red House Mystery!

Welcome, Phyllis, so glad you found us! That podcast sounds great - could you give a link to it?

Hi Everyone! I've been reading mysteries since my first Nancy Drew book, and I love puzzles and being inside the head of the detective. I always love Sayers and Marsh as well as keeping current with my favorites, Grafton, Penny, and King. I just got an e-copy of Five Red Herrings so I can join in with what feels like a lively, friendly group.

Hi Linda, great that you've joined and are ready to join in the read of Five Red Herrings! Thanks for the kind comment about the group. :)

Judy wrote: "Welcome, Phyllis, so glad you found us! That podcast sounds great - could you give a link to it?"

Here is the link, Judy - www.stitcher.com/podcast/classic-myst.... I am sure that it is available through ITunes as well.

Hi Linda - welcome to the group. Glad you joined!

The podcast is available through iTunes, Phyllis. There is an episode on "Missing or Murdered," among others, which I have just downloaded :)

Many thanks for the podcast details, Phyllis and Susan - looking forward to listening! Great news that it has an episode on Missing or Murdered.

I love podcasts and enjoy listening to them in the car, so great to discover a new one that will be of interest.