Ask A Book Critic: I want a murder mystery that happens somewhere pretty

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Life has been extra busy lately so I’m looking for a compilation of good short stories/long essays, where it’s okay if I go even weeks in between. Maybe something along the lines of Curtis Sittenfeld’s You Think It, I’ll Say It. I tend to read more nonfiction psychology (personal and work) but I’d like to get more into fiction. Thank you!

I have three recommendations for you: one funny, one mind-bending, one beautiful.

First, Samantha Irby is probably one of the funniest people alive right now. Like a wiser, more scatologically inclined David Sedaris, she is best able to express her particular brand of hilarity through essay collections, of which she has written four.

I have a special fondness for Wow, No Thank You, which came out in 2020 and seemed tailor-made for those pandemic days. (Irby prefers to stay inside anyway, noting that inside is where her boyfriend, the television, lives.) Here, she explores what it’s like to have sort of made it after a very poor childhood, the joys of Target, the indignities of IBS, and the surprisingly rich territory of lesbian bed death.

Second, there’s a collection of stories by Ted Chiang, the science fiction writer who wrote the novella on which Arrival was based. Chiang is the kind of writer who will come across a single scientific idea or paradox and then find a deceptively simple way to dramatize it so that all the complexities of the idea become radiantly, terrifyingly clear. In his collection Exhalation, he imagines how a technology that perfectly records past events would change our ability to forgive one another for our sins; what we might owe to sentient robots designed to be a cross between children and pets; how Einstein’s relativity affects the fairy tale idea of destiny.

Finally, George Saunders is the most celebrated American short story writer of the past 20 or so years. What sets Saunders apart is his ability to mix absurdist satire with an almost utopian love for and faith in human beings, even at their very worst. His characters tend to speak in naive, underplayed sentences; to be fond of various inane brands and trends invented by Saunders; to experience startling moments of compassion when least expected. I’d recommend checking out The Tenth of December, Saunders’s masterpiece.

Stardew Valley is my comfort game and I would love to find this in book form. A story about starting over in a small town and building relationships with the locals while working on an old homestead to bring it back to tip-top shape!

My friend, what you want is All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot. Herriot was a vet in Yorkshire in the 1930s, and he wrote a series of deeply charming memoirs about his time there: the culture shock of moving to rural farm country, the respect he developed for the farmers’ relationships with their animals, the way he came to know and love the animals themselves. (The books also inspired a superlatively cozy PBS series of the same title.) If you want stories about winning over the residents of a clannish small town and finding ways to make the farms healthier and stronger than they were before, you will not do better.

I enjoy reading mysteries and murder mysteries or police procedurals in other countries. I don’t like mysteries that have a gory high body count. It allows me to do some armchair traveling as well. I have read mysteries in Greece, India, England, and Italy. I am currently reading a series based in Shetland (Ann Cleeves). I enjoy stories that provide a feel for place and a rounded character study. Including history and geography are important components. I love sci-fi too that includes those elements and a sense of adventure and discovery.

Have you read any Sarah Caudwell? She was a highly popular detective novelist in the 1980s who died around 2000, and I think she might be up your alley. She wrote a series of novels centered around the amateur detective Hilary Tamar (age and gender never specified), a professor of medieval law who is always solving a new murder in an exotic location with the help of their wise-cracking crowd of barrister friends.

The glory of Caudwell fits right alongside your preference outlines: her books are highly place-driven, and they are superlatively witty. Hilary seems to have no interest in solving a murder if it didn’t happen somewhere lovely and lavishly described. (The first, Thus Was Adonis Murdered, takes place in Venice, and there are others in Corfu, the Norman island of Sark, and a small English village.) Hilary also seems to have no interest in solving a murder if it means taking life at all seriously. They approach their crime-solving with a cool ironic glee that is endlessly contagious.