Sue Grafton’s titles are always something like “A Is For Apple.”
Harry Kemelman’s books always had titles like “Wednesday, the Rabbi Washed the Dishes.”
John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee stories always had a color in the title (e.g. “The Throbbing Purple Eggplant”).
What other authors always had some kind of formula for their titles?
Janet Evanovich numbers her Stephanie Plum novels: One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three To Get Deadly, and so on. (We want more of those, not the ones with that other person.)
I know there are more, but I can’t think of them right now.
The Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovitch. All the titles contain a number (in consecutive order, e.g., One for the Money was the first one.
Simulpost!
Ed McBain has an 87th Precient series of mysteries with alphabetical titles–Ax, Bread, Calypso, Doll, Fuzz, Ghost, Heat Ice, etc. and he started them long before Sue Grafton was even published.
McBain’s Matthew Hope mystery novels all have names from children’s fairy tales, rhymes, etc–Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and my favorite “Gladly the Cross Eyed Bear.”
Just to be really nitpicky (sorry, I can’t help myself), it’s not A is for Apple, it’s A is for Alibi. And all the other words in the titles are crime-related (Burglar, Corpse, Deadbeat…)
The 87th Precinct novels have a lot of one-word titles, but they weren’t published in any kind of order and don’t encompass the alphabet.
Lawrence Treat is the author who started the alphabetical titles with B as in Banshee in 1940. He also did a D, F, H (twice), O, P, Q, T, and V.
Ellery Queen’s first nine novels were The Geographical Noun Mystery. Roman Hat, Greek Coffin, Chinese Orange, etc.
Craig Rice did a variation on this with The Thursday Turkey, Sunday Pigeon, and April Robin Murders.
Glen Cook has a series of sf mysteries with metals in the titles: Sweet Silver Blues; Bitter Gold Hearts, and Copper, Tin, Brass, and Iron.
Lawrence Block does The Burglar who… Liked to Quote Kipling; Studied Spinoza; Painted Like Mondrian and several more.
George Baxt did a wonderful series of mysteries starting the Dorothy Parker Murder Case, but moving over to Hollywood, with everybody from Alfred Hitchcock to Mae West in the titles.
One real oddity: C. C. Benison, whose mysteries are solved by Queen Elizabeth and one of her maids. Death at Buckingham Palace; Death at Windsor Castle; Death at Sandringham House. He appears to have stopped them with Diana died, possibly because she was an occasional character.
Sue Grafton’s father, G. W., was a mystery writer, BTW. His first two books had the same detective and their titles were the first two lines of a nursery rhyme: The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope and The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher.
I’ve not read any of them, but there’s Lilian Jackson Braun’s books whose titles always start with The Cat Who…
Robert Ludlum’s novels seem to have three words in the title, like “The Bourne Identity”, “The Parsifal Mosaic”, “The Holcroft Covenant”, “The Icarus Agenda”, etc. This is not true for all of his titles, though - some of them have four words.
James Paterson’s Women’s’ Murder club all have sequential numbered titles.
1st to die, 2nd Chance and 3rd Degree
Margaret Truman’s mysteries all are “Murder at/in Someplace in DC”…Murder At Ford’s Theater, Murder on Capitol Hill, Murder at Union Station, etc., except or one of her books, Murder in Havana, where the crime is moved outside of DC.
Also, while it’s a TV show and not a series of novels, each episode title of Monk starts with “Mr. Monk…” You’ve got episodes like “Mr. Monk and the Gameshow”, “Mr. Monk and the Girl who Cried Wolf”, and “Mr. Monk Takes his Medicine”, for examples from this season.
All my posts start with:
Kid Chameleon
Charter Member
:smack:
Stephanie Barron’s mysteries with Jane Austen as the detective all have titles beginning with “Jane and the…”
The titles of Martha Grimes’ Richard Jury mysteries are all taken from pubs that are featured in the story.
Along similar lines, with a few exceptions, Anne Perry’s Thomas and Charlotte Pitt mysteries are named after real or fictitious London locations.
His Alex Cross detective novels all use parts of nursery rhymes. “Jack and Jill”, “Roses are Red”, “Violets are Blue”, etc.
My Mother is a big fan of the My Friend series of books. I’ve never read them.
J.D. Robb, who is the alter ego of Nora Roberts, writes books with titles that end with “In Death”. For example:
Naked In Death
Glory In Death
Immortal In Death
to name the first three as they are best if read in order. 
Fred Hunter’s Alex Reynolds mysteries were all two words, the first being some governmental term and the second being a slang term for “homosexual” starting with the same sound. Government Gay, Capital Queers, Federal Fag, National Nancys. That was until he broke the pattern with 2001’s The Chicken Asylum.
Nathan Aldyne’s Dan Valentine/Calrisse Lovelace series were all colors: Vermillion; Cobalt; Slate; Canary.
Diane Mott Davidson has a series of murder mysteries with a caterer as the main character. They all have food related titles. Chopping Spree. Tough Cookie, The Main Corpse, and so on.
They’re ok stories, although I’ve read better mysteries. But the books always include some of the tasty recipes mentioned in the plot, so I can live with them.
Well, this is movies, and, it’s Steven Seagal, so you’ll have to excuse the decided lack of literary quality (if you could consider a Steven Seagal movie screenplay to have any resemblance to literature), but his formulaic movies had formulaic titles that were mostly adverbial phrases which allowed the movie trailer guy to announce that…
"Steven Seagal is…"
Out of Reach (2004)
Out for a Kill (2003)
On Deadly Ground (1994)
Under Siege (1992)
Out for Justice (1991)
Marked for Death (1990)
Hard to Kill (1990)
Above the Law (1988)
moriah is… out of here.