My on-and-off relationship with mystery novels

Readers who have read this blog for a while know that I have read many, many mystery novels in my life, but that over and over again, since childhood, I have gone through a cycle regarding them. I have loved them, then have gotten tired of them, then somehow started a new phase of reading them. Over and over. (See my posts of 1/27/10, 1/5/16, and 11/12/16 on this topic, for example.) As a refresher: I have gone from the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys of childhood, through the great classic British novels (some classified as “cozies”) (e.g., by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, and more recently, Elizabeth George), the stories of tough American women detectives (by, e.g., Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton), the historical mysteries (by Jacqueline Winspear, Charles Todd), and many more, including, fairly recently, Deborah Crombie, Louise Penny, and Donna Leon. I also sometimes re-read mysteries that I last read years or decades before (and therefore have conveniently forgotten the solutions to the mysteries). Often, unfortunately, I don’t find the same interest in those favorites of yore. For example, I re-read one or two novels of Josephine Tey and Dorothy Sayers, and did not feel the same about them any more. The exception was re-reading the always-wonderful P.D. James. In the past couple of months, I had one of my resurgences of reading mysteries, focusing on more Tana French novels, and on the Thursday Murder Club series, by Richard Osman. Those were enjoyable to read, but suddenly – I never know when or why this will happen – once again, I got tired of mysteries. By now I have accepted this ebb and flow of my interest in this genre, and the unpredictability of when it ebbs and when it flows. But I always return to mysteries eventually…