Testing Out New Talents

In many respects, 2022 was a terrible year.

Vladimir Putin, hoping to reassemble the old Soviet Union, launched an unprovoked invasion of neighboring Ukraine that has led already to tens of thousands of deaths on both sides, and has demonstrated the weakness of Russia’s supposedly mighty military force. More than 200,000 Americans perished of COVID-19, despite vaccines that saved millions of others from the grave. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed its own 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, ending the constitutional right to abortion and ushering in new state restrictions on what women can and cannot do with their bodies. Thanks in part to inaction on gun-safety legislation, the United States last year suffered upwards of 600 mass shootings, nearly double the number from half a decade ago. And despite the fact that Republicans in the United States failed to achieve the “red wave” they had hoped would give them dominant power in Washington, D.C., right-wingers did narrowly win control of the U.S. House of Representatives, though they’ve done nothing but embarrass themselves ever since, failing repeatedly to elect a new speaker.

Personally, however—and despite the fact that I endured a concussion in the spring—last year proved to be a generally favorable time. I posted almost 250 stories in The Rap Sheet during the last dozen months, plus another 70 or so in Killer Covers. Although I published only three new articles in CrimeReads last year, they represented some of the best work I’ve done yet for that Web site. And, rather to my surprise, I managed to read more books by authors new to me in 2022 than I had the year prior.

I’ve been keeping track of my writer “discoveries” ever since 2008, with the conviction that it’s important to continue broadening my exposure to unfamiliar voices in both fiction and non-fiction. The high point so far came back in 2015, when I savored a total of 47 books by wordsmiths whose work I hadn’t previously read. Partly due to pandemic isolation, that count plummeted to just 26 in 2020. In the succeeding couple of years, the number has—thankfully—climbed again. In 2022, I read some 90 books, 37 of them by new-to-me writers (up from 34 in 2021). And all five of my favorite crime novels of last year were penned by people whose prose I hadn’t hitherto sampled.

Below you’ll find my record of the fictionists I “discovered” during these last 12 months. First novels (not all of which debuted in 2022) appear in boldface type. Of those 29 works, all but two—The Sweetness of Water and The Great Mistake—can at least arguably be accommodated under the rubric of crime, mystery, or thriller fiction.

• Samantha Jayne Allen (Pay Dirt Road)
• D.V. Bishop (City of Vengeance)
• Fredric Brown (The Fabulous Clipjoint)
• Shelley Burr (WAKE)
• W.H. Flint, aka Gerard Helferich (Hot Time)
• Nathan Harris (The Sweetness of Water)
• Robert J. Harris (The Devil’s Blaze)
• Woody Haut (Skin Flick)
• Alan Judd (A Fine Madness)
• James Kestrel, aka Jonathan Moore (Five Decembers)
• Ausma Zehanat Khan (Blackwater Falls)
• Jonathan Lee (The Great Mistake)
• Simon Mason (A Killing in November)
• Tom Mead (Death and the Conjuror)
• Philip Miller (The Goldenacre)
• Dwyer Murphy (An Honest Living)
• Leonora Nattrass (Black Drop)
• Karen Odden (Under a Veiled Moon)
• Michael Oren (Swann’s War)
• Alan Parks (May God Forgive)
• Chris Pavone (Two Nights in Lisbon)
• Mark Pryor (Die Around Sundown)
• Clayton Rawson (Death from a Top Hat)
• Douglas Skelton (An Honorable Thief)
• Jane Smiley (A Dangerous Business)
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor (The Cape Cod Mystery)
• S.S. Van Dine, aka Willard Huntington Wright (The Benson
Murder Case)
• Josh Weiss (Beat the Devils)
• David Young (Death in Blitz City)

Of course, I don’t limit my reading to fiction. A number of the new non-fiction titles I enjoyed last year were penned by authors quite familiar to me, such as Martin Edwards (The Life of Crime), Candice Millard (River of the Gods), and Daniel Stashower (American Demon). Others I tackled as part of my research for a CrimeReads piece about the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872. Here’s the full rundown of 2022’s fresh finds:

• Ron Elliott (American El Dorado: The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872)
• Susan Jonusas (Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier)
• John Sedgwick (From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West)
• Greg Steinmetz (American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street’s Biggest Fortune)
• Volker Ullrich (Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the
Third Reich )
• Richard White (Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University)
• Robert Wilson (The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West)
• Andrea Wulf (The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World)

As usual, I ended the year disappointed that I hadn’t found time to read more books than I did, and vowing to try harder in 2023. We’ll see 365 days from now how successfully I fulfilled that resolution.

So how goes the campaign to broaden your reading horizons?? Let us all know in the Comments section at the end of this post.