Community Library Notes - May, 2026
The History of Mystery
by Sarah Nathe
 
Mystery-loving members of the Mendocino Community Library, and there are many, are always eager to read the newest whodunit from a favorite writer. Or the hot bestseller from an author fresh on the scene. A patron came in the other day looking for the latest nail-biter from Laura Dave, which we just happened to have, but after she left, I wondered why nobody ever comes in asking for the earliest Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. Is anybody reading Poe these days except high school kids freaking out over “The Tell-Tale Heart”? With all the emphasis on newness, we are overlooking the writers who made the genre what it is today. Can we even remember them?
 
With the help of Howard Haycraft’s “Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story,” I refreshed my own memory. Edgar Allen Poe wrote the first pure mystery story in 1841: “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It established a pattern that is still used. At the center of the plot is a crime: two mutilated dead women in a locked room on an upper floor of an apartment building. The main character is a brilliant amateur detective, C. Auguste Dupin. There is no obvious way a murderer could have entered or exited the room. Witnesses are interviewed, apparent contradictions are worked through, and the case is solved through use of reason (and sometimes opiates). That’s the formula used by countless mystery writers, ancient and modern.
 
A couple of decades after Poe, important writers in England and France expanded the genre into novels. Mysteries by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins are somewhat known today: Dickens’ “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and Collins’ “The Moonstone” are still read by English majors. Emile Gaboriau’s “L’Affaire Lerouge” are read by francophone literature enthusiasts.
 
The first mystery novel in the United States was written by a woman, Metta Victoria Victor, who wrote “The Dead Letter” in 1866 under the pseudonym Seeley Regester. Her contemporary was Anna Katharine Green. She was a recent college graduate when she wrote her first novel, “The Leavenworth Case,” in 1878. That novel was successful and Green is sometimes called “The Mother of Detective Fiction,” She also created the first two women detectives: spinster Amelia Butterworth, and young sophisticate Victoria Strange.
 
Arthur Conan Doyle’s debut novel, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in the 1887 edition of “Beeton’s Christmas Annual,” a paperback magazine, and the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were printed there until 1927. Doyle was an ophthalmologist with a not-very-demanding practice so he had time to write 56 short stories and four novels, the last of which, “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” was published in 1902. He modelled Holmes on one of his medical school professors, Joseph Bell, whose powers of observation and deduction amazed students.
 
Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote the first American detective novel to make it onto the best-seller list, “The Circular Staircase,” in 1908, and a number of successful novels thereafter. In 1930’s “The Door” she introduced one of the most famous catchphrases in the genre: “The butler did it.” By the time of her death in 1950, her work had sold over ten million copies. On both sides of the pond, the years between WWI and WWII are considered the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

​Rinehart’s contemporaries in Britain and the Commonwealth—Christie, Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh—have been dubbed “The Queens of Crime.” Agatha Christie was the queen of queens, writing more than 100 novels, plays and short stories; selling hundreds of millions of books; and creating both Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, two of the best known characters in English literature.
 
My own favorite among these royals was Dorothy Sayers, whose Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries I read devotedly when I should have been prepping for my thesis defense. The clever conversations between the charming Lord Peter and his love interest, Harriet Vane, were far more engaging and heart-warming than, say, Carlisle and Tennyson. When I parted company with Wimsey and Vane at the end of Sayers’ last novel, “Busman’s Holiday,” I felt I had lost some good friends.
 
The Golden Age in the United States was populated by five men: S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Rex Stout. Van Dine is best remembered for his detective, Philo Vance and his nonfiction “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” Ellery Queen was both the pen name of cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee and their detective’s moniker. At the end of their books, readers were challenged to produce the correct solution before it was revealed. They also created “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine,” an important outlet for wannabe mystery writers. Carr is acknowledged as a master of the locked room mystery.

Erle Stanley Gardner wrote 127 books, 82 of which feature attorney Perry Mason. Whether we’ve read any of the books, we’ve all seen Mason/Raymond Burr perform courtroom miracles to thwart prosecutor Hamilton Berger. Rex Stout was a successful businessman before wrote his first novel in 1934. “Fer-de-Lance” introduced the rotund gourmand Nero Wolfe and his live-in associate, the skirt-chaser Archie Goodwin. Those are the themes; the rest is variation.

We have a few of these classics, but if you can’t find the one you want on our shelves, many of them are free to read at Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/30), an online library of more than 75,000 free eBooks.
 

A Bumper Crop of New Books-April, 2026
by Sarah Nathe
 
Chances are most of us have put in our gardens by now, given the summery weather we’ve been having, so there’s not much to do for the next couple of months but water and feed. And read. The Mendocino Community Library is ready for us, with something new for book lovers of every taste.
 
Fiction
In Tayari Jones’s 2018 novel, “An American Marriage,” one of her characters shares her views on the ties that bind: “I don’t believe that blood makes a family,” he says. “Kin is the circle you create, hands held tight.” In her new novel, Kin, two girls, Annie and Vernice, are both robbed of their mothers while still infants. They grow up together in the tiny town of Honeysuckle, LA, but they are fated for different paths. As they follow them, they learn about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a Black woman in the South
 
The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans, is a wonderful novel about the comforts of literature and connections with other people. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer, sits down to write letters: to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university that will not let her audit a class, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to critique their recent books, and to one person to whom she never sends the letters.
 
No one knows you like your book club, according to Anna Quindlen’s new novel, More Than Enough, but when they give Polly Goodman an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. Polly thinks that this must be a mistake, but still she cannot help combing through her family history for answers. In the process, Polly begins to question the meaning of family and friendship.   
 
Mystery
If you want something a little more gripping, the new Jane Whitefield mystery from Thomas Perry, The Tree of Light and Flowers, ought to be just the thing. A car crash brings on the premature birth of her baby, but Jane can’t settle in and take care of it. A series of events forces her back into her old job of protecting vulnerable people, but this time it’s her own family she must rescue.
 
In the new Joe Pickett whodunit, The Crossroads by C. J. Box, game warden Pickett fights for his life as his daughters try to uncover who shot him and left him for dead. Joe was found in his pickup at Antler Creek Junction, a crossroads connecting three ranches, each road leading to a dangerous family with a bone to pick. His three daughters split up to uncover the truth of what happened to their father.
 
A generous donor gave us about a dozen William Kent Krueger books that feature his private investigator, Cork O’Connor. Krueger has written 20 of these mysteries set in and around Ojibwe reservations in northern Minnesota, and now the library has nearly all of them. The main character, P.I. and former county sheriff Cork O'Connor, is part Ojibwe and part Irish, and he covers a lot of pine-scented ground investigating crimes on the reservations and off.
 
If you’ve been feeling a little paranoid lately, and who hasn’t, maybe avoid Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey.  Grisham’s real-life passion for justice led him to work with McCloskey’s Centurion Ministries, dedicated to exonerating innocent people wrongly convicted. The book recounts the hard-fought battles for exoneration, looking at what leads to wrongful convictions, and the racism, misconduct, flawed testimony, and court system corruption that make them hard to reverse.
 
Nonfiction
From the bestselling author of “Too Big to Fail,” the history of the 2008 banking crisis, comes a narrative of the infamous stock market crash: 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How it Shattered a Nation. Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the battle between Wall Street and Washington, and studies the characters whose ambition and naïveté led to disaster. The highs and lows of this era are eerily similar to ours, where markets soar, political tensions mount, and financial influence plays out once again.
 
Speaking of that, Thom Hartmann’s The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink argues that Trump is a symptom, not the disease. The real story is the ecosystem that built him: a childhood defined by cruelty, a mentor who weaponized shamelessness, a political party that sold its principles for power, and a donor class that used him to destroy the guardrails on their own greed. It ends on a hopeful note, offering seven strategies for defeating authoritarianism before it becomes permanent.
 
For some escapism, try a couple of our popular new movie DVDs. “Song Sung Blue” tells the true story of a couple of Neil Dimond tribute singers and proves that Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson can both really sing. In “Hamnet” Oscar-winner Jessie Buckley proves she can really act—as the long-suffering wife of Will Shakespeare. And, as always, there are some great new jigsaw puzzles to distract you.
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​After more than half a century of community support, the Mendocino Community Library now holds 13,000+ books, puzzles, audio books, and movies - including those filmed in Mendocino.
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