Why We Love a Sinister, Gothic Mystery: Lucy Foley’s, The Guest List
Suspects, suspense, & surprise
Thanks to you, Nancy Drew
As a kid, I read every Nancy Drew mystery available. I’d get them at the library and haul home five or six at a time. My family was one of book lovers, and every birthday or Christmas, I’d get at least one teenaged-sleuthing-female-mystery-fighting Nancy Drew. Sometimes, for variety’s sake, I’d read The Hardy Boys, an old copy of the Bobbsey Twins, or an ancient book my grandmother had of The Boxcar Children.
Even in grade school, I was an eclectic reader, mixing mysteries with biographies and science with romance. I still am. But no doubt — thanks to Nancy Drew — the mystery genre heavily influenced my future choices.
Classic Gothics
As a young adult, I was mesmerized by Daphne DuMaurier’s “Gothic,” Rebecca, and its powerful combination of romance, distrust, disease, isolation, insecurity, and death. Jane Eyre provided the same titillating thrill of loneliness, creepiness, romance that gave me the heebie-jeebies the first time I read it.
Less classic, but still good reads, I pursued Barbara Michaels (aka Barbara Mertz) who also wrote Egyptian archeologist mysteries under the name of Elizabeth…
