A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: X is For EXtras

 This is the post where I slip in a couple of items I had no room for, elsewhere. I have only managed to find a word starting with X once, when I was doing an A to Z about Greek mythology, which does have X words in it. 

This time, I will start with Faye Kellerman, who I was going to write about in K, but Kerry Greenwood died, so I gave her that post instead. If you haven’t been following, feel free to go back and read. 

Faye Kellerman is an American mystery writer. It seems to be all in the family, because her husband Jonathan and their son Jesse are also mystery writers, though Jesse also writes plays. I saw Faye and Jonathan at the Melbourne Writers Festival some years ago. I haven’t read anything by Jonathan, because his books are psychological thrillers, not my favourite genre. 

Faye’s books are basically police procedurals, with Jewish themes; the author is herself an Orthodox Jew. Her main characters are police detective Peter Decker and Orthodox widow Rina Lazarus, whom he eventually marries. They meet in the first novel of the series, Ritual Bath, when there has been a crime in her local community. Peter was brought up as a Baptist by his adoptive parents, but his biological parents were Jewish teenagers. He decides to study and become Orthodox himself. None of this stops him from investigating crime. There are twenty-seven Decker/Lazarus mysteries, though Faye Kellerman has written more books, including a novel about Shakespeare and a Jewish woman. I haven’t read all of them, but have, so far, enjoyed the ones I have read. 

Second Extra: Enid Blyton. I don’t know about you, but she was my introduction to mystery fiction. She wrote several series in which a group of children solve mysteries. The best known is the Famous Five series, of course. Three siblings, Julian Anne and Dick, have adventures and solve mysteries with their cousin George(Georgina), usually during the school holidays. The fifth member of the group is George’s dog, Timmy. A friend of mine calculated that, by the end of the series the kids should be in their twenties! 

Kerry Greenwood wrote a Famous Five short story in which they solve the mystery of some missing ginger ale. She had fun with the sexism of the original stories, with Anne finally objecting to being expected to do all the cooking. 

There was another series, the Five Findouters, which was set in a village rather than the holiday travels of the Famous Five. It’s a lot funnier. The group is made up of Fatty(Frederick), Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets and Fatty’s dog Buster. Fatty is the leader and Sherlock Holmes of the group. He is able to get into disguise and work out whodunnit. The local policeman, Mr Goon, hates them because they always solve the crimes before him. Buster snaps at his heels quite a lot. Notice that he is named “Goon”, a slang word for police, and sent up? 

I read these books in my childhood and loved them. The Famous Five alone are still selling around two million copies every year.

See you tomorrow!