MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE AUTHORS I LIKE
AND WHERE TO FIND THEM

Whenever I'm at a party and someone discovers that I'm a mystery writer, the question that always comes up -- after "Should I have heard of you?" and "Where do you get your ideas?" and "Can you really make a living writing that crap?" -- is, "What other authors do you like?"

It's hard to answer that, as I read widely and indiscriminately, and I'm inordinately fond of several writers that I could not possibly recommend to you unless I was pretty sure that your taste was as cosmopolitan (read "odd" or "strange")as mine. John Kendrick Bangs comes to mind, as does Harry Stephen Keeler.

I guess I'll start with a list of mystery and suspense authors I can recommend, with maybe one or two science fiction authors thrown in. As I discover their web addresses, for those who have web addresses, or web addresses devoted to their works. I'll insert them.

The Classics:

Fredric Brown
Raymond Chandler
Arthur Conan Doyle
Avram Davidson
Dashiell Hammitt
H. Beam Piper
(here's the Unofficial H. Beam Piper web site)
Dorothy Sayers
Rex Stout

The Good Guys:

Larry Block
G. M. Ford
Joe Gores
Sue Grafton
Barbara Hambly
Tony Hillerman
Richard Lupoff
Dennis Lynds
(who writes as Michael Collins, John Crowe, Mark Sadler, and a bunch of other people.) Visit his web site here.
Gayle Lynds
(Mistress of the espionage suspense thriller.) She can be found here.
Marcia Muller
Sara Paretsky
Bill Pronzini
Steven Sayler
Donald Westlake