Have a drink

Starting a blog on crime fiction is a little like trying to drink from a fire hose, to use an unfortunately tired cliche.  Actually it is more like contemplating the drink from the fire hose.  Because of course you want to check out the other crime fiction blogs out there, and as soon as you start to do that you realize that there are about five billion of them, maybe a hundred of which are actually any good (the remaining four billion etc. appear to be disturbingly like your own - "i really love this book!!!!").  But who has time to follow all those blogs?  And more to the point, who are these people that have ALL THAT TIME to sit and read books and then write about them?  And I recognize about none of the books anyone ever talks about!  It is true that my preferences direct me away from much modern and earlier crime writing.  But I'll tell you, if you like this stuff, you could do worse than to start with J. Kingston Pierce's The Rap Sheet, which pretty much covers everything happening in crime fiction, as far as I can tell, and references many other blogs (some good, some less so) as well.  Another one I like, but don't follow as carefully, is Peter Rozovsky's Detectives Beyond Borders, which hews more closely to my preference for non-US based stories. 

It's like travelling, one could spend all one's time reading about it, and never doing it. 

Anwyay, coming soon . . . finished If the Dead Rise Not, thoroughly enjoyed my first taste of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels with Ratking, and am just getting started on Blue Lightning, the final book in Anne Cleeve's Shetland Isles quartet.