I’d call the Ballad series too popular to count as obscure.
Although Max Allan Collins isn’t obscure, his early Mallory series is. Set in eastern Iowa, which he knew well, these are nothing like the later, gimmicky (IMO) works.
Bill Pronzini’s wife is Marcia Muller.
I like the Owen Keane series by Terence Faherty about a failed seminarian turned metaphysical detective:
Nobody needs to know any of the others except Richard Stark. (Most of them were never used for mysteries in the first place. The mystery pseudonyms that are even slightly important are Tucker Coe and Samuel Holt.) Most of the Stark books have been reprinted as by Westlake, though. (As have most of the non-softcore others.)
And looking through IMDb, I see that nine movies have been made from the Stark books and nine movies made from Westlake books. The Stark movies are by far better and more famous, too.
There’s something to be said for Westlake’s God Save the Mark, however.
I’m very partial to James Lee Burke’s stylishly-written Dave Robicheaux novels.
They’re quite dark crime stories, set in Louisiana, with a very strong sense of place and local history. Burke has two lead characters - Robicheaux himself and his former partner Clete Purcell - who I always enjoy spending time with. Especially the rather … colourful Clete.
The books’ weakness is that they’re kind of formulaic, essentially providing variations on a theme rather than any real surprises from one novel to the next, but as long as you don’t read more than one a year that’s not a huge problem. The audio book versions are excellent too.
I would have thought those too popular to qualify.
I met his cousin outside of Blazing Salad’s in downtown Boston years - decades, actually - ago. She was so please to see me enjoying her cousin’s book, I didn’t have the heart to tell her I bought it on the remainders table. But finds like Burke is why I loved remainders.
You may be right, j666. My persective from here in the UK is that JLB gets less publicity (and less respect) than many other contemporary American crime writers. If he’s got a higher profile in the US than I’d realised, then I’m delighted to hear it.
Your Burke encounter reminded me of something that happened to me in Baltimore back in October 2007. I was visiting the city because I was a massive fan of The Wire and curious to see the place for myself. Needless to say, I stuck mostly to safe tourist enclaves like the Inner Harbour, where my book of choice for the week’s stay was David Simon’s Homicide. That’s his journalistic record of a year spent with one of Balitimore’s real murder squads, and it’s the book which inspired NBC’s Homicide: Life On the Street.
I was reading Simon’s book in a Fells Point bar called John Stevens Ltd one Sunday evening while waiting for my food to arrive. The young black waitress saw the cover and said, “My sister’s in that book”. When I asked her to tell me more, she directed me back to page 190 and the tale of Denise, an Amity Street girl who’d stashed a gun for her drug-dealer boyfriend. That guy had other girlfriends besides Denise, one of whom he was later convicted of shooting to death.
By the time I’d read through Denise’s story again, the waitress has disappeared so I never got a chance to question her further.
I loved the Harry Stoner detective novels byut Jonathan Valin in the 80s and early 90s. Out of print perhaps, but wotht the read if you can find them.
No mentions of some of my favorites, and I can’t tell if they’re unknown, or too well known to be mentioned …
Joan Hess write two of my favorite series. The Maggody series is set in an Arkansas town with a population of under a thousand, and features police chief Arly Hanks. The Claire Malloy series is set in Farberville, Arkansas. Both are very witty with plenty of crazy yokel characters.
John Sandford writes three very good series: the Lucas Davenport Prey series, the Virgil Flowers novels, both set in Minnesota, and the Kidd series. The first two are cops and Kidd is an artist/hacker/criminal, but still basically a good guy.
Johnathan Grant wrote the Lovejoy series – eventually produced as a very enjoyable TV series starring Ian McShane.
Adam Hall wrote the great Quiller spy thriller series.
James Ellroy writes the darkest books I’ve ever read, the best known of which was made into the movie LA Confidential.
I’d consider Boyo Jim’s authors to be fairly well known–but I’m impressed that he knows Jonathan Gash’s real name.
Bumping an older thread–I just found the John Cardinal series by Canadian author Giles Blunt. So far there are six, and I binge-read all of them, one after another, most greedily. I really, really enjoyed them, and now I’m anxious for another one. I have to wait, and I don’t wanna! I found them very satisfying reads, and I liked seeing the progression in the characters’ lives. Also, some Canadian content, which is what I was looking for when I found them. Highly recommended.
Stephen Greenleaf’s John Marshall Tanner novels, published from about 1979 to 2000, were pretty good, tough, angst-ridden, with some politics. Ditto former wrestler and smart researcher Tom Bethany in 6 or so novels by Jerome Doolittle, written in the 1990s I think Ross Thomas blurbed them enthusiastically. Finally, the Jake Lassiter series, called Travis McGee with a briefcase, by Paul Levine. I think there are a couple of new books in the series, which started in 1990.
I read one of the books off that list, Mr. Monk in Outer Space. Monk solves the murder of Gene Roddenberry. Or at least the guy who created a science fiction TV series an exact analogue for Star Trek. There is some satire about the attendees at the convention at which he’s shot.
Awful doesn’t begin to describe it. Monk is the worst human being on Earth. I only saw a couple of episodes of the TV series but Tony Shalhoub is a different species from this creep. Lee Goldberg was writing several of these every year and fifty other series simultaneously; it shows.
A couple of British female thriller authors active currently / recently, whose books as below, I like – find them absorbing, and well-written, leavened with humour. Both are toward the “cozy” end of the spectrum, but IMO not cloyingly so.
Carola Dunn (British, now USA resident): the Daisy Dalrymple mysteries. Set in England the early 1920s: the eponymous heroine is a splendidly un-stuffy aristocratic young woman who becomes acquainted – through meeting him in the course of a murder investigation in the first of the series – with a middle-class detective inspector; becomes his unofficial assistant and ultimately his wife. I feel that the period and milieu are captured excellently – not least, by the reader’s being made aware of the ever-present shadow of the recent World War I and its aftermath. Could be described as a kind of “Dorothy L. Sayers lite”, without Sayers’s IMO occasional pomposity and intellectual narcissism.
Kate Ellis, author of a mystery series set in a particular, thinly-disguised, part of South Devon (well known and much loved by the author), starring the detective division of the British police in the area. In each novel, a present-day murder is interwoven with a “counterpart” episode in the area, in some previous historical epoch. The central present-day characters are mostly likeable; however, the author is at pains not to gloss over the presence of a lot of (sometimes nasty) crime and general low-life, in a highly picturesque and idyllic-seeming favourite tourist-trap part of England.
Here’s a brief blog post I wrote about Top of the Lake.
Speaking of British thriller writers - Mo Hayder. She’s probably not obscure in the UK, but I rarely find her books in stores here. Very dark and creepy, not the slightest bit cozy. A few of her books are stand-alone but most feature detective Jack Caffery and several other complex characters.
Garry Disher writes a very good series of gritty, cerebral murder mysteries set in Australia.
Will admit that I’m hard to please – maybe absurdly so – as regards fiction in general: ready to concede that often, the fault is most likely in me, rather than the “product”. Some random coments, “pro” and “con”, follow.
I read a number of these, long ago – loved them. Well written, fascinating and unusual milieu and cast.
Never heard of these before. They sound potentially fascinating – to be sought out.
Was put off these, and never got into them, owing to a quirk of long-standing English regional partiality / animosity / prejudice. I’m from the more southerly parts of England, and like many such as myself, am repelled by the phenomenon which seems often to surface, of the “professional Yorkshireman” (no-nonsense unsentimental, chauvinistic, great self-esteem, short fuse, forthright often to the point of habitual offensive rudeness). A lot of this is central to Dalziel & Pascoe. I’ve enjoyed a few non-D & P novels by Reginald Hill.
I’ve heard good things from a number of sources, about these novels: recently tried a couple; but, I’m afraid, totally “not my bag” – couldn’t get far into them. Overall, I find the ancient Romans mostly a turn-off: nasty bunch IMO.
Read a few of these, and honestly found them, a lot of the time, incomprehensible: just could not make out what Burke was on about. Also, Burke seems from the books, to have a big thing about masturbation, and how utterly wicked and despicable it is. Entitled to his opinion, and all that; but I’d rather he kept this stuff out of his murder mysteries.
I’ve read all the Burke books, most of them more than once, and have listened to 4 of them on audio books in the last 3 months and don’t recall a single reference to masturbation. Are you thinking of someone else?
Unmentioned but then she may be too famous is Sarah Smith’s Alexander Reisden and Perdita Hall series. There are only 3 so far.
Anne Perry I am pretty sure is too famous. I read both the Pitt and Monk (not that Monk) series as they come out. There are tons of those. They have the extra fillip that whenever you think “oh, nobody would get that worked up and…” then you realize “never mind, she knows what people might do!” :eek:
The very famous Peter Straub has a mystery trilogy: Koko, Mystery and Throat that is not as well read as his horror. They are three of my favorite mystery books.
I chime in on recommending the Ballad novels, the Pendergast series and John Sandford’s books. I love the very dark Mo Hayder. In that same vein Karin Slaughter is wonderful. Start with Blindsighted.
Recently discovered the Aunty Lee series, set in Singapore, written by Ovidia Lee. The first book was great, the second so far, not quite as good. But still good.