For a Reader

My Favorite Mystery Novel of the Second Half of the 20th Century

When I read mysteries, I read as an author as well as for enjoyment. I am always trying to learn how the author created the atmosphere or the red herring or the golden coin in the story. In that way, I am learning the art of mystery writing. 
I have read and therefore been taught by many of the best mystery writers of the English language and that includes those translated into English. (If I did not have a lead tongue, and a mind that refuses to learn another language, I might have been tempted to read some of these famous mysteries in their native tongue.)
I learned reading from Michael Connelly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Lawrence Block, Lee Childs, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sue Grafton, J. D. Robb, James Lee Burke, Janet Evanovich, and many others that I cannot remember at the moment.
Pacing, distraction, logic, presentation, and characterization can be learned from reading others's writings. Flaws and mistakes are present even in the works of the greatest authors, and an alert reader can learn from others missteps.   
But only one manuscript affected me to the point that I remember it as the best mystery novel written after 1950. 
That book is The Poet by Michael Connelly. 
Although some less than kind reviewer stated the characterizations were not deep, I believe that reviewer to be too picky.  
If this manuscript were an old house with many rooms, the same reviewer would say it was too dusty to appreciate. If you walk through this old house, you would note doors you never saw or noticed from a distance. If you opened these doors, they reveal facts and views that you could not have suspected. After passing through the door, you realize the views could be anticipated prior to venturing in the room. They were not because the architecture hid the clues in the woodwork and the furniture. That made them difficult to see, but the facts were there. While you focused on walking, you missed all that was around you.    
Connelly does not surprise you with twists of logic once or twice in The Poet, he flaunts and parades twists, as if his writing were a Twizzlers factory. He even ends the book in this manner.
And that leads to The Narrows, a later novel involving many of the same characters, some of whom were presumed dead.  
He also makes the reader sense all the fear of his characters from the safety of our chair. Combining these two accomplishments so flawlessly makes this a masterpiece of a novel. It did win an Anthony and the Dilys award in 1997.
I believe that people read mysteries not just to solve the puzzle. But  in The Poet, the puzzle is well conceived and the logic is tight. That helps the reader suspend his disbelief. But the level of evil encountered in this book, is so high, that one reviewer called the villain a comic book evil. However, that reviewer forgot that just prior to the book, it was discovered that the Internet was being used by pedophiles to accomplish their ends. The book transports a mutated reality onto the page. No comic book was ever this evil. No hero was ever this real to the reader. 
Readers want to realistically but safely experience true danger and true evil.  Thankfully few of us will meet or experience a Hannibal Lecter in our lifetime, or a pedophile like Eidolon, but through the pages of a novel, we can live with these criminal for a short time and quite intimately and still live to tell about it.
In The Poet, Michael Connelly let us live with a murderer who is also a member of a ring of predators and just when you think it is over, it is still on. Wow.  

What is your favorite mystery novel and why?

-- L. Preschel author of the Sam-Cath mysteries.