Postmodern mysteries

[Famous Mortimer]

http://www.postmodernmystery.com/reading_list.html

Just happened upon this list and it sounds right up my street. I remember reading "The Name Of The Rose" as a teenager, but I wasn't ready for "Foucault's Pendulum". Might be now, though.

Any favourites from the list? Anything you'd add?

[Mister Six]

The Fairy Gunmother by Daniel Pennac is quite fun, a light and frothy inversion of detective tropes concerning a bunch of elderly people who act like they're teenagers because they were born on February 29th, so they've only had one birthday in four.

Description from Wikipedia:

The novel is set in the modern Parisian quarter of Belleville. It starts with the dramatic death of a policeman, shot by a "grannie" he was trying to help, and witnessed by at least four others who conveniently forget all details of what they see. The inspector Van Thian goes undercover as a Vietnamese old woman to investigate. Three other investigations follow: one into the attempted murder of a young woman, another into the serial killings of small old women in the district, and a third into drug trafficking by old men. Benjamin Malaussènne, professional scapegoat, quickly becomes suspect number one of all four investigations, owing to the numerous children of his prolific mother he lives with, the various old men with obsolete talents that he shelters, and his repeated abortive romantic affairs. Like all novels in the Malaussène saga, the setting is anything but conventional, the streets of Paris brimming with immigrants in open celebration of their diversity, the situations rarely Gallic yet authentically Parisian.

It's a sequel to The Scapegoat, which I haven't read, but googling around I came across its namesake by Sara Davis, which I've seen described as "a Lynchian mystery", though again I've not read it myself.

Description per Goodreads:

N is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father—unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. His investigation leads him to a hotel built over a former Spanish mission, a site with a dark power and secrets all its own. On campus, a chance meeting with a young doctor provokes uncomfortable feelings on the direction of his life, and N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa, and a shameful episode from his past.

Meanwhile, a shadowy group of fringe academics surfaces in relation to his father's death. Their preoccupation with a grim chapter in California's history runs like a surreal parallel to the staid world of academic life, where N's relations with his colleagues grow more and more hostile. As he comes closer to the heart of the mystery, his ability to distinguish between delusion and reality begins to erode, and he is forced to confront disturbing truths about himself: his irrational antagonism toward a young female graduate student, certain libidinal impulses, and a capacity for violence. Is he the author of his own investigation? Or is he the unwitting puppet of a larger conspiracy?

[chveik]

postmodern doesn't make much sense as a qualifier there. Poe and Chesterton belong on the list

[Catalogue of ills]

Hawksmoor is a cracking book for tone and atmosphere. If you like dark underbelly stuff with some occultism thrown in, then that's a winner.

Pale Fire by Nabokov is an extraordinary book and would merit a thread in its own right if anyone had read it. I know it won't necessarily be to everyone's taste and yet I still can't recommend it highly enough. In some ways you could argue its invention has been diluted by the tonnes of metafiction since published, but I still rate it very highly.

[QDRPHNC]

Pale Fire is beautiful, stunning, one of the best things I've ever read, and it only improves as I get older.

[Famous Mortimer]

I'm reading "Gun, With Occasional Music" from the list in the first post, and I'm rather enjoying it. It has got a bit of first-novel-itis, perhaps, where he tries to pack in a bit too much, but it's not bad.

[Famous Mortimer]

"Gun, With Occasional Music" was pretty damn good, and has definitely got me interested in reading more Lethem.

Next up is "The Serialist" by David Gordon. It does have a touch of the Nathan Barley about it, where the author goes out of his way to have a pop at New York hipster culture, and there are a few passages early on where I had to look him up online to see if he was a prick (it appears he isn't, but his narrator definitely is). Another winner.

[Neville Chamberlain]

Bought myself Hawksmoor and Foucault's Pendulum. I seem to remember having a crack at Foucault's Pendulum when I was about 14 or something, but not understanding a flipping word of it. I reckon I'm going to work my way through this list, slowly but surely - looks like a lot of the kind of fiction I've been looking for. Thanks for posting, FM!

[Famous Mortimer]

Glad to hear it, Nev!

I just finished "The Serialist", and I enjoyed it. The incorporation of chapters from the trashy novels of the protagonist worked pretty well, and I liked the characters, even if the underage sidekick was a bit too much. I feel like the postmodern elements were pretty well integrated into the story, too.

As far as I can gather, after another book about an unsuccessful author who becomes a detective ("Mystery Girl"), he's written a series about Joe The Bouncer. Although the main character has a bunch of wacky attributes (strip club bouncer! Reads Dostoyevsky! Kicked out of Harvard! Former Special Forces!) they sound like entirely standard thrillers, therefore outside the remit of this thread. I think I'll read more of his stuff at some point, though.

Next up is "Foucault's Pendulum", which I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into.

[poloniusmonk]

I really enjoyed the Serialist, and Mystery Girl is fun too, if I recall correctly. But I read the first of those Joe the Bouncer books and it was competent, entirely uninspiring and didn't make me want to read any more of the series. A shame.

[neveragain]

Would 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller' by Italo Calvino count? It has a mystery running through it and is postmodern, so I guess it would. Also, it's pretty damn good.

I haven't read House of Leaves yet but think that would also qualify.

[Catalogue of ills]

Would 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller' by Italo Calvino count? It has a mystery running through it and is postmodern, so I guess it would. Also, it's pretty damn good.

'Outside the town of Malbork'. Yes, I think that would definitely count, and I agree it is pretty damn good. Best depiction of European railway stations in literature - a niche accolade, but a deserved one, I like to think.

[Mobbd]

Paul Auster's New York Trilogy.

[Famous Mortimer]

I'm about halfway through "Foucault's Pendulum", and it's brilliant.

[Famous Mortimer]

And finished (I won't do this again, it's a stupid way of posting about a book).

It definitely dragged from halfway to about 100 pages before the end. The breathlessly exciting assembly of their grand conspiracy was hampered by knowing it was all bollocks, and it wasn't interesting enough in any other way to maintain interest - for instance, not much character development.

Women got short shrift too, as the two main women in the book were sort of nothing characters - the sexy latina communist, who just disappeared from the story and didn't even get a "hey, this is how she ended up" paragraph later on, and the other woman who solely existed to string Belbo along and then play a nothingy role in the conspiracy at the end. You could count Casaubon's girlfriend, but she has only gets one short paragraph where she does anything, and that's just to calmly tell the main character he's talking shit.

I'm being too harsh on it, perhaps, as I enjoyed a lot of it, and the story itself was great.