M is for mystery series

When I pick up a book by an author I've not read before, I want to like the book. And if I like the book and it's part of a series, I will go and read the whole series, preferably one right after another. I don't like coming in on the middle, so I'll track down the books leading up to the books if necessary.

When I was in high school, I worked at the local library, which had a really good mystery section, even in the Large Print section. (And what a boon eReaders have been to people who need larger print. It always made me sad that unless you wanted to read Reader's Digest and a small selection of best sellers, your large print options were limited.)

Somtimes the series went on so long that they started to get stale, but I kept with them. Here's a list--in no particular order--of mystery book series I devoured.

Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro Mysteries--I love these books, set in Imperial Japan and they set off a lifelong fascination with the country and the history. The covers were gorgeous too. 

I came to these books by way of the television series: Robert B. Parker Spenser.
Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael--I liked the Cadfael books so much that when I ran out of them, I moved on to the books Peters wrote under her real name, which were  historical fiction and not mysteries.
janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum (By the numbers) I hated the movie, but still think the books would make an awesome television series.
Robert Crais' Elvis Cole novels --I love, love, love the Elvis Cole novels and now there are spin-offs for Joe Archer, one of the characters first introduced in the books
Nele Neuhaus' Fairy Tale series--Set in Germany, there are only two books in the series so far, but they're great.
Ed McBain's 87th Precinct books--Forget NYPD Blue, these were the procedurals for me.

William Marshall's Yellowthread Street mysteries (which sparked my desire to go to Hong Kong)
M.C. Beaton's Hamish Macbeth series (there's a fantastic TV series starring Robert Carlyle out there, with Danny Boyle writing and directing. I tried reading her "Agatha Raisin series but they were just too "twee" for me).
Catherine Aird's Sloan and Crosby books
Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte Pitt novels
And last but not least--Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew and Franklin Dixon's Hardy Boys mysteries. They were the books that inspired my love of reading mysteries and I can still remember saving up my allowance to buy them.

It's a numbers game

I am lately obsessed with numbers--my weight (lower is better), my followers on twitter (higher is better) and two lists of things have attracted my attention. I've been adding movies to my NetFlix database so the AI can make recommendations (they keep telling me I'll really, really, really like Speed, and I so don't believe them). I have close to two thousand films listed.

Meanwhile, over at GoodReads, I'm trying to fill out my list of books because I'm now obsessed with listing EVERY SINGLE BOOK I EVER READ. And that is a really large number. I've read several books a week since I was a kid and that hasn't changed. (Except nowadays, people PAY me to read books) I've only got 671 books listed on my GoodReads shelf. Around a quarter of what I listed for movies. (And it's not that I am ashamed of admitting I've read a lot of crap. I read Gothic novels as a teen, and moved on to romance. I read every vampire book ever written except the The Shiny Metal Grin.

I just can't remember every author. I went through my mother's Nero Wolfe books and her Agatha Christies and kept going. Robert Barnard and Liza Cody and more.

But what this enumeration exercise has done is remind me of all the writers I stopped reading but who haven't stopped writing. Why didn't I read all the George Chesbro novels about Mongo? (Because they started getting really odd and fanciful around number 7.) What about all those Elvis Cole books I haven't read? This is definitely a summer to catch up with old friends. And then I'll list the books on my GoodReads shelf.