You can't solve mysteries with a name like Smith.

Guten Bloggen,

I never much cared for mystery novels. Or thrillers. There’s a thin line between horror and thriller, and usually that line involves some sort of demon child or clown or haunted filing cabinet that’s hiding in a dimly lit office, just waiting to bite the hero’s face off. Thriller and mystery novels are usually the boring kind of scary. They contain stories about government conspiracies, and lots of running done by guys in suits. In a horror novel, the suit would be stuck to a politician’s skin, slowly choking him every time he made another unjust judicial decision. Horror equals fun and exciting. Mystery equals boring things my mom would read.

Sorry, Mom.

But, as with any point of contention, I am prepared to stand corrected when contrary evidence is laid before me. In the past month I read two mystery novels, both on recommendations and both, oddly enough, having the word ‘tattoo’ in the title. I didn’t hate either of them. I didn’t hate either one of them at all.

The first, “Bangkok Tattoo,” was part of a spec-freaking-tacular series by John Burdett. It focuses around a Buddhist detective in Bangkok named Sonchai Jitpleecheep, who spends as much time covering up crime and helping his mother run a brothel as solving murders. The story lines are bizarre, sexy, and violent. They frequently comment on western culture in such a honest way that it‘s hard to do anything but laugh at yourself, while playfully shaking your fist at Mr. Burdett‘s photo on the dust jacket. An unexpected side-effect. Sonchai is forever describing the delicious Thai food he’s consuming, which left me in a constant state of craving for pad thai and curry.

On to the second mystery of September. Maybe you’ve heard of it? I even mentioned it in a previous blog post. It’s a little novel called “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” by Stieg Larsson. This dark story follows Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist hired to solve a forty year old murder, with the help of a genius, though asocial, punk girl named Lisbeth. Along the way, Mikael has lots of sex, discovers some clues, uncovers a few conspiracies, and almost gets kissed by a serial killer. He’s that sexy.

Now, I often use my sister as a good judge to tell if a book has truly made the rounds. My sister, for those of you who don’t know, is a doctor. She’s an anesthesiologist to be specific. In other words, she is infinitely smarter than me, which is why she gets to vacation in Peru and New Zealand, while I am living in an apartment in Los Angeles that costs less per month than certain pieces of her wardrobe. If my sister has heard of a book, then most likely it’s popular. I say this only because my sister is an incredibly busy woman, and doesn’t have the time I do to wander aimlessly for hours through the shelves of her nearest book selling establishment, or google the top steam punk novels 2010 to see which whimsical tale of airships and technomancers she should add to her library. I’m fairly certain my sister doesn’t know what a technomancer is. A couple months ago, my sister was about to go on a vacation, and asked what I’d heard about “this dragon tattoo book.” And thus, you could officially say, everyone and their sister was talking about Stieg Larsson.

However, unlike many mass appeal novels that have overtaken our literary sphere, this one does not make me want to vomit from my soul. It’s popular… and well written! No! How can that be?? Most likely because the author was Swedish and a journalist and not a lonely housewife with nothing better to do. It’s like Harry Potter, only for adults, and also there’s no magic, and Harry‘s a forty-year old journalist instead of a wizard. But he does hang out in a dark little room solving forgotten mysteries and many people do die and they all have very silly names. Hehe, Blomkvist! So yes, it’s exactly like Harry Potter.

All joking aside, I never would have picked this book on my own. It was just too well known, too talked about. But like with Bangkok tattoo, I was surprised by the open discussion of sex, the dark and graphic violence, not to mention all the contradictions to our own, tight-laced western culture. The book weaves together multiple stories of sexual violence against women, and what those women do in response, a topic usually reserved for overly dramatic, flowery, stories likely to be mentioned on the Oprah show. Not so much with Mr. Larsson or Mr. Burdett for that matter. These two novels are gritty, their heroes’ actions morally ambiguous, or at least questionable. I suppose this makes the stories more real. It certainly makes them more fascinating to read.

I lift my glass to these novelists, for redeeming the mystery genre in my eyes. I gave you old ladies holding magnifying glasses. You exchanged it for a hot blond dude and Thai hookers. Good sirs, I am eternally in your debt.