Question of the week: the first mystery

It’s time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics.

This week’s question: if you read mystery novels, what was the first mystery novel you ever read? No wrong questions, obviously.

For myself, I think it was TELL NO ONE by Harlan Coben. This was way back in 2001, and I had a long car ride coming up. At that time, I didn’t read anything except fantasy and science fiction, but I had gotten TELL NO ONE as a present, and I didn’t have anything else to read in the car. So I started reading TELL NO ONE during the ride. It’s about a ER physician whose wife was murdered eight years ago. Then one day, out of the blue, the physician gets a message that could only have come from her. Suddenly people show up to kill him, and the physician finds himself on the run from the agents of a sinister billionaire.

I was definitely hooked, and I’ve read mysteries and thrillers on and off since then. I think this was good for me long-term since I ended up a writer, and it’s good for writers to read widely in different genres. You can always tell when a science fiction novel, for example, was written by someone who has never read anything but SF.

-JM