Who Was Your First?

There’s a lively discussion going on over at Crimespace, having to do with the first adult crime novels people read. Mickey Spillane, Agatha Christie, Lawrence Sanders, and Elmore Leonard all seem to have been used as entry drugs into the genre. As I’ve explained before, I started out reading Ross Macdonald and then went on to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Robert B. Parker. They led me, in turn, to Arthur Lyons, Sara Paretsky, Peter Lovesey, Loren D. Estleman, John. D. MacDonald, and ... well, pretty soon the list got out of hand. Although I was introduced to crime fiction through television, books in this field long ago became of greater interest to me. Like so many others, my reading crime fiction has finally convinced me to try writing it myself.

If you’d like to join that Crimespace discussion, click here.

And by the way, the woman who started this particular thread, Carole Gill, has one of the coolest Crimespace pages I’ve seen yet. There’s nothing like a little “In the Mood” to get one’s batteries charged first thing in the morning.