Books like Mortal Mischief — picked by fans

I am a wee bit obsessed with mysteries. This is my genre of choice for vacations, plane rides, and the occasional lazy afternoon. And I love the way that Barbara Neely blends a classic whodunnit with the topic of gender equality. Barbara Neely, who is now deceased, left the world with a gem of a 4-book series about Blanche White, who is a domestic worker by profession—and an accidental sleuth on the side.

But what I love most about this series is the way Neely weaves huge issues like misogyny, racism, classism, and violence through her story while delivering a smart, page-turning mystery. In her own words, “fiction is a good place to do activism.” 

I’m not a fan of novels that are paced like greased rockets, as if the author’s afraid you’ll suddenly throw the book across the room, turn on Netflix, and order a pizza. Which is a key reason I love this book. Precious Ramotswe is a “traditionally built” woman who solves crimes in a superbly witty yet unhurried fashion and with deep compassion that stops short of sentimentality.

Her heart (huge) and brain (gently incisive) work in perfect tandem in this book. The plot is simple, which will frustrate readers who prefer intricate puzzles in their crime fiction. But for me, the pleasure lies in leisurely getting to know this wise, ingenious detective and her humble neighborhood in Botswana’s capital city.

Nabb’s Marshal Guarnaccia, unflamboyant and patient, is an unspectacular thinker but a brilliant listener with a real, if unsentimental sympathy for the people he deals with on both sides of the law. Without fancy vices or personal charisma, Guarnaccia’s fundamental decency is nowhere on better display than in The Marshal’s Own Case, set among the desperate young transgender prostitutes of the Florentine sex trade, a culture quite different from the Marshal’s own secure family life.

The chief attraction of Fred Vargas’s novels is her cast of characters, led by Chief Inspector Adamsberg, a most unconventional leader of any criminal investigation outfit. Small and disheveled, good with animals and children, dreamy and often seemingly idle, Adamsberg is not only extremely bright but has confidently surrounded himself with remarkable colleagues. Hard-drinking Adrien Danglard, a single father of five with a huge store of ready information, and Violette Retancourt, a woman of prodigious strength and courage, are among his entertaining subordinates, along with Snowball, the division’s cat that proves equally remarkable in one memorable outing. 

The Max Liebermann mystery series is about a dashing early 20th-century Viennese psychiatrist and disciple of Sigmund Freud who uses his understanding of human psychology to help solve horrible crimes.

While discussing ongoing investigations, Max and his good friend, the chubby Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt, play both chess and duets (Max accompanies Oskar’s lieder singing) while consuming delicious-sounding Viennese pastries and specialty coffees.

I love it when Max consults his mentor, Dr. Freud, and enjoy the fact that not even the most gruesome crime can get in the way of refreshments. 

A century after German scholars developed art history as a highly conservative meta-theory well suited to the study of the broader categories of “civilization” and “culture,” the Viennese psychoanalytic movement developed a highly radical meta-theory that posited civilization and culture as fictions meant to curb individual desires. 

Art historian Mary Bergstein illuminates photography's rich role in Freud’s thinking. Bergstein deftly reminds us that Freud’s interdisciplinary approach to the history of art and the new science of psychoanalysis was specifically meaningful to his time and place. During the brief period when Vienna would be recognized as the capital of European modernism, psychoanalysis developed as a meta-theory—a radical one—with the cult of individual desires and fears at its heart.

The second in the Liebermann Papers: a mystery series featuring Freud-student Max Liebermann noted as literature’s first psychoanalytic detective who helps the pragmatic and gruff Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt solve some of fin-de-siecle Vienna’s most dastardly crimes. While since made into a successful PBS series, the book’s atmospheric rendering of the Baroque jewel’s opulence is countered by the stark portrayals of anti-semitism, paranoia, and the primitive, cruel, and rudimentary techniques used to “treat” patients suffering from mental disorders.  

This book summarizes the contributions of Otto Rank, the brilliant and influential psychoanalyst. Rank focused on two core psychological motivations, the desires for psychological security on the one hand, and for stimulation, growth, and creativity on the other. His work illuminates how these desires often work in concert but also often can be in opposition over the course of the lifespan, contributing to guilt, anxiety, and stunting growth. Rank’s analysis inspired the development of both existential psychology and humanistic psychology. Rank’s approach to psychological well-being is based on accepting and even affirming the limitations of life, understanding what you really want in life, and developing the will to move creatively toward achieving those goals so that one can live an authentic and satisfying life.   

This well-written, tightly-argued little book of 1995 gathers together four feature articles from The New York Review of Books that together represent a watershed moment in ‘Freud Studies.’ For here was the NYRB, a long-standing bastion of psychoanalysis, publishing splashy articles that functioned like a Hollywood expose of Freud’s failings as a man, thinker, and therapist. In truth, Crews was simply giving voice to a ‘revisionist’ portrait of Freud that started in earnest in the wake of Jones’s three-volume ‘life and work’ of Freud (1953-57). Best of all: Crews connects it all to the ‘recovered memory’ movement of the 1980s and 90s, thereby drawing a disturbing portrait of Freud’s legacy.  

This is a very good, fair, smart, early interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis in general, and of its significance for culture and intellectual history in particular. It’s very well written, probably because Susan Sontag (Rieff’s wife at the time) is widely reported to have actually written the book, and in the 1960s the book became highly influential. It is easily Rieff’s best book.