From Loving Mysteries to Writing Them: A Guest Post from The Devlin Quick Mysteries Author Linda Fairstein

I can still remember the tremendous feeling of excitement it gave me when I sneaked off to my room with a couple of books from the desk of my older brother and read the first few adventures of The Hardy Boys. I was about ten years old, and I was thrilled to find teenaged brothers who were actually solving crimes together in their hometown of Bayport, with a bit of help from their detective father. I have always been drawn to mysteries, so the idea of kids using their brainpower to figure out how to crack cases before the adults around them could was enormous fun. These were also the books that first introduced me to characters that reappear in story after story, which gave me the sense that Frank and Joe Hardy were fictional friends, and that in my imagination I could put myself in their shoes and involve myself in their adventures. It was a pretty clear path from The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, to my own desire to create my young sleuth, Devlin Quick. There are so many great stories that shaped my reading habits for life.

It didn’t take long for my school librarian to tell me that there was a teenaged girl named Nancy Drew who could do everything the Hardy Boys did with her own posse of friends. She recommended that I start at the beginning of the series—­something I still like to do— and I was pretty much hooked when I picked up The Secret of the Old Clock, which was the first of Nancy’s many adventures. I grew to love her courage, her sense of justice, and her independence, although I was very grateful that my small city had far less crime than River Heights. She had style, too, and the memorable jacket illustrations had me dreaming of growing up to be like Nancy—and have a blue roadster as well. Nancy Drew remains an inspiration for me, and I think that both career paths I chose—as a lawyer and as a crime writer—grew out of my devotion to this series of books.

I have always been grateful to librarians and booksellers who put interesting books in my hands. My school librarian introduced me to a brand-new book called The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare, which later went on to win the most prestigious prize in publishing for young readers, the Newbery Medal. The book is set in the 17th century, and tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl named Kit Tyler, who is kind but also rebellious, and gets herself into a difficult situation once orphaned and taken from her home in the Caribbean to live with relatives in the strict society of puritanical New England. The combination of history with a bit of mystery and suspense made this book one of the most memorable from that period of my life.

My love of mysteries is clearly part of my DNA, inherited from my father, who was a great reader. It was he who decided it was time for me to read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes—a collection of twelve short stories—when I was in middle grade. This is a gift that has lasted a lifetime, as I return to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories over and over again. To me, Doyle is the model of a brilliant storyteller. My two favorites among the dozen in this volume are “The Red-Headed League” and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”—although the latter probably spooked me more than any other fictional piece I read at that age. I still marvel at Holmes’s powers of deduction and his unique methods of solving crimes.

Edgar Allan Poe was another of my father’s literary introductions. Poe is credited as the creator of “detective fiction.” and his three short stories featuring the amateur sleuth Auguste Dupin are the first of his Gothic works that I read. I loved the sense of place the author described— Paris— in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” For me, Poe’s work also marked a crossover into literature that was more clearly intended for an adult audience, and that transition was stamped on my memory as well.

I still sample a lot of middle-grade fiction to keep up with what readers are enjoying, and to select gifts for young friends and family. John Grisham has long been one of the writers I most respect, and I’ve read every novel that he has written for adults. So how could I resist Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer when it was first published? Here’s a thirteen-year-old who dreams of being a courthouse lawyer, and despite his other talents in school, his legal skills are what draw his classmates and folks in town to seek his help. Theo doesn’t know it, but twelve-year-old Devlin Quick hopes to partner with him on a case one day. The books in this engaging series are among my favorites.

Another of my middle-grade heroines is Claudia Kincaid— not because she ran away from home, but because the place she chose to go (for both its elegance and its comfort) is the majestic Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg is an absolute classic. The intrigue is part of my delight with the story, but so is the sheer fun of the adventure, and the chance to understand the art world through the eyes of Claudia Kincaid.