Who is your favorite mystery writer?

Mysteries are a major genre of fiction and satisfy a certain need. The goal of a mystery is, in many ways, to make the reader feel smart. See, you got to the answer before the detective did! And the detective is a genius.

Mysteries come in many flavors, but they have been entangled with speculative fiction for a very long time. Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel is a buddy cop police procedural (Asimov was, in some ways, better at mysteries than at science fiction). More recently, Mur Lafferty’s Seven Wakes is a locked door mystery with the twist that the characters are solving their own murder. Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead is a great detective story in the tradition of Holmes and Poirot, but the victim is a god. And, of course, urban fantasy and mystery cross over constantly…Harry Dresden is a private investigator and Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant novels are, yup, another police procedural.