One of the joys of writing book reviews is discovering authors I've never read before.
For instance, I discovered the work of Twist Phelan after picking up one of her books at Book Expo and finding it to be awesome. That's when I started writing reviews (on another blog -- I hadn't thought to start this one yet). When I found a book I really loved (especially by a midlist, small press or indie author that wasn't a household name, but probably should be), I felt almost obliged to tell everyone why they should read it.
This has been true for many authors, including (to name only a few off the top of my head) Megan Abbott, Alex Carr (aka Jenny Siler), Reed Farrel Coleman (aka Tony Spinosa), James Crumley, J.T. Cummins, Christa Faust, Timothy Hallinan, Mercedes Lambert (aka Douglas Ann Munson), Scott Nicholson, C.J. West, Donald Westlake (aka Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, et al.), Simon Wood, Daniel Woodrell, and now Ken Bruen (I'm doing a review for Mystery Scene Magazine of Ken Bruen's upcoming novel and--wow!).
That's just a short list of ones that come right to mind. And it doesn't even count major bestselling authors (such as Walter Mosley, Sue Grafton, Robert Parker, et al.) or classic crime fiction authors (such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross McDonald, Margaret Millar, et al.).
The thing about these authors is they all have backlists. A few of them stretching out into eternity.
And, once I've found out how great they are, I want to read them all.
This creates something of a love/hate feeling about the whole thing. I really love to read great fiction, but I can only read so fast and I have a limited amount of time I reserve toward reading.
On top of that, I'm well aware that there are many other great authors I haven't even gotten around to reading yet.
To make matters even worse, I've limited the discussion to the mystery, noir, suspense and thriller genre(s?). What about all the great sci-fi? What about the awesome mainstream, commercial and "literary" (whatever that means) fiction? How about historicals? What about memoirs? Non-fiction?
*sigh* Let's face it. I'll never catch up.
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