Murder, Mayhem and Madness. (And That’s Just in the Publishing Houses.)

The office with my name on the door was two small rooms on the second floor of a bank building on Cahuenga, at the end of a corridor that smelled of rye whiskey and Aqua Velva. Aqua Velva was my partner, a Hopi Indian with a face like a police sketch. She was blind in one eye and had a tendency to retain water whenever trouble was coming.

* The case walked in on a pair of black satin pumps, with heels that were saying something to me, and I think it was something pretty bad because I felt as if I was about to break out of my genre. Aqua said she was feeling crampy and walked out. I never saw her again, but I heard she became a jockey at Churchill Downs and started a series of private eye novels. She is known as the Dick Francis of water-retentive Hopi jockeys. The place still stinks.

* The blonde stood in front of me and chewed her lip, looking for a moment as if she might cry. Then she pulled out a pistol and pointed it at me. She said she needed my help. She told me she was a lesbian forest ranger, and that she had been a puff pastry chef for the circus, the French-Canadian one, but she had given it up to write a series of detective novels. “I’m manic-depressive,” she purred. “I’m published by Random House.” Just then she pulled a manuscript as big as a cinder block out of her pantyhose and tossed it on the desk. The title was written in calligraphy, one of her other bad habits, but I could make it out: “Ladyfingers on the Trigger: A Culinary Mystery.” Right under that she had macramed bits of string so that they spelled out the words “No animals were cooked or otherwise injured in the preparation of this book.”

“Read it, peeper,” she hissed like a drugstore pressure cooker.

This was what the job had become, providing cheap patter and dime-novel plot twists for dysfunctional college girls. Ever since murder mysteries became one of the hottest profit centers of the book publishing industry, my waiting room has been filled with writers looking for a little of the muscular prose of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer and the sinister beauty of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. I was Marlowe’s ghost. I was all they had.

I told her it was a good yarn but I thought there were too many egg yolks in the flan recipe. She thought it over for a minute, then she pumped a .38 slug through the jacket of my blue seersucker suit. I was beginning to take a real disliking to that one. Suddenly there was another muzzle flash, and as I felt myself sinking into a dark place, I heard the trailing voice of Aqua Velva from the outer office. “Write what you know,” she said.

Where once stood the hard-boiled detective--a man’s man, with few needs and still fewer pleasures; alone and unadorned by all but his own intelligence and a few filterless cigarettes--now come the many-footed gumshoes of the hyper-modern private eye. He is no longer the lonely literary figure he once was--there were more than 1,400 new mystery titles published last year-and, in fact, he is often a she. And no matter what the gender, they are all privately eyeing the bestseller lists.

“It was extremely unusual as recently as 10 years ago for any mystery title to make the bestseller lists,” says Jim Huang, who monitors the mystery publishing business as both a bookseller and editor of the respected Drood Review, which publishes reviews and summaries of upcoming releases bimonthly. “These days there are a number of writers in the field-Sue Grafton, Tony Hillerman when he’s writing about Navajos, Sara Paretsky, Robert Parker, Dick Francis and Patricia Cornwell-whose books are pretty much automatic [bestsellers].”

No one, not even the publishing houses, who keep their own books a closely guarded secret, really knows how many of the 2.2 billion books sold or the $25.5 billion in publishing revenues generated last year came from mysteries.

“There’s no simple way to even identify what publishers call a mystery,” says Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Los Angeles and its parent store in New York, where sales have risen steadily for the last 17 years. “Ask Knopf if they call ‘Intensity’ [by best-selling author Dean Koontz] a mystery. It is a pure crime suspense novel, but they would never, ever categorize it as a mystery because they feel the term is too limiting. You can’t get publishers to give you numbers for a category in which they’re denying many of their biggest books even belong.”

While publishing houses have been trimming their lists during a decade of consolidation, mystery authors and their heroes have flourished as never before. There are organic gardening sleuths by the bushel, ferreting out clues from life’s great compost heap. There are cycling detectives and recycling detectives. There are private eyes from the worlds of astrology, pathology, psychology and geology, and a one-handed piano player. There are undertakers, forest rangers, meter readers, battered wives, manic-depressive P.I.s. There are sleuths in retirement homes, sleuths with no homes; dog breeders, cat leaders, dwarfs, jockeys, gay baseball players, lesbian tennis players and city mayors. And one lathe operator.

There is even a botanical mystery series by Los Angeles writer Rebecca Rothenberg, featuring pistil-packin’ sleuth Claire Sharples. “But it’s not as if there’s this big map with pins on it, and new writers see the blank spaces and say to themselves, “Oh look, no one’s written about integrated garden management in Bakersfield,” says Rothenberg. Set in the San Joaquin Valley, the series quickly found a niche audience. “I may be the only author who has a cult following in the UC Davis sustainable culture society,” Rothenberg says.

“It just makes you laugh after a while,” says Chris Pepe, who edits Dick Francis and Robert B. Parker for Putnam’s. “You sometimes feel like saying, ‘Don’t tell me, it’s another dwarf Lithuanian dancing school instructor driving a Passat.’ There’s too much of that. All those hooks can’t make up for the basic good stuff that you want from a book.”

They do, however, provide publishers with a fiendishly handy marketing tool, which accounts for the genre’s robust health relative to conventional fiction.

“Some of them are flat out, blatant, unabashed, unashamed gimmickry,” says San Diego author Abigail Padgett, who decided to make her investigator, Bo Bradley, manic-depressive after dealing with her own son’s struggle with the disorder. “I don’t feel that having my character suffer from manic-depression is a gimmick because it came out of an intense personal trauma, and a very clear political agenda that I have to help people understand psychiatric illnesses. On the other hand, yeah, it is a gimmick. But I don’t see anything wrong with writing about anything that people are interested in reading.

“Murder mysteries were not always the literature of inclusion, as Raymond Chandler himself made clear in ‘The Little Sister,’ published in 1949. A woman telephones Philip Marlowe’s office. “This is a very delicate matter, very personal,” she tells him. “I couldn’t talk to just anybody.”

“If it’s that delicate,” Marlowe replies, “maybe you need a lady detective.”

“Goodness, I didn’t know there were any,” she says. There is a pause, as both she and Marlowe take a moment to consider this. Then, “But I don’t think a lady detective would do at all.”

Nobody, least of all Chandler, wanted to contemplate setting loose the female private dick (the phrase itself was sufficiently suggestive to delay her by several decades). She didn’t arrive until 1977, when a previously unpublished San Francisco author named Marcia Muller wrote “Edwin of the Iron Shoes,” widely considered the first modern novel in which the shamus was a dame. Licensed detective Sharon McCone gave the hard-boiled private eye a shot of estrogen with which to chase his wry.

“The hard-boiled tradition had been a male prerogative for many years,” says Sue Grafton, who followed with her own female P.I., Kinsey Millhone, five years later, “simply because men knew about punching people out and kicking doors down. But I think by the time I started writing, it was almost as if the male hard-boiled private eye had become a parody of itself. Everybody was imitating the imitators, and the form had become stale. The women coming into it didn’t understand the unspoken protocols of men, so we just did it our way. Now men are suddenly doing it slightly differently, and I think it must be a big relief.”

Neither Muller nor Grafton was ever inclined to let her heroine simmer much past the soft-boiled stage--plucky, funny Kinsey Millhone may, in fact, be the avatar of yet another subset of the genre: the feel-good murder mystery. But they remained true to their calling and managed to avoid the ladies’ literary auxiliary known as “cozies.” Cozies exist in a sort of parallel universe of English vicars’ wives pedaling quaintly from clue to clue on bicycles, though since the death of the genre’s still-unchallenged grande dame, Agatha Christie, the cozies have immigrated to America.

In the wake of Grafton, Muller and Sara Paretsky’s Chicago-based, tougher-than-press-on-nails V.I. Warshawski, it seemed real women might eat quiche, but they didn’t write cozies. “Too-cozy mysteries really sicken me,” says Sara Ann Freed, Muller’s editor at Mysterious Press. “They have nothing to do with reality. The biggest part of the fiction-buying public is women. Why wouldn’t they want to read mysteries about non-wimpy women?”

It took Grafton seven letters of the alphabet before she finally broke through to the New York Times bestseller list with “ ‘G’ is for Gumshoe” in 1990, but she has not missed it since. “The idea that here were women characters, being written about by women, who were doing things that were different than the traditional hard-boiled detective might do was a real watershed,” says Bob Miller, vice president and publisher of Hyperion. “Suddenly there was a lot more about the protagonists’ lives and their relationships with other people.”

By the late ‘80s, such male stalwarts as Robert B. Parker’s Spenser were being retrofitted with sidecars, in Spenser’s case to make room for gal pal Susan Silverman and his black sidekick Hawk. “Five or six years ago, all of the publishers wanted their own female P.I.,” says San Diego author Taffy Cannon, whose latest installment in the Nan Robinson series, “Class Reunions Are Murder,” is due this month. “Then came the period when it wasn’t enough to have a private investigator, it had to be a private investigator with a gimmick. These days it has very little to do with writing talent. There are brilliantly talented writers who have had nowhere near the success of other people who, though they write perfectly nice books, have been very lucky. And it’s hard not to be bitter about that.”

IN MANY WAYS, DIANE MOTT DAVIDSON IS THE face of contemporary mystery fiction in America, and at this particular moment it is a very long face. Davidson has run out of the homemade chocolate chip cookies that she was giving away with each signed copy of her latest novel, “Killer Pancake,” a murder mystery with recipes.

She does not consider the cookies a gimmick, just a way for her to thank the loyal fans who have come in March by the hundreds to a hotel in Boulder, Colo., for the sixth annual Left Coast Crime convention, where mystery authors mingle with fans and booksellers. “A gimmick is not going to work if it’s just a gimmick,” Davidson says. “It might work for one book, but if it doesn’t have integrity. . . . “ A man walks up to the signing table where she is sitting. ‘Where are the cookies?” he demands. When Davidson says her husband has already taken them to the car, the man turns and walks away.

Davidson was a lay preacher in the Episcopal Church when she turned to murder-for-profit six years ago, writing about a caterer-turned-sleuth named Goldy Bear (mercifully now remarried as Goldy Schultz). “When I started, I was the only one who put recipes in the books,” she says. “When you’re starting out, it’s up to you to do all the publicity. I took out a second mortgage and spent the equivalent of my advance, but it was worth every penny. The way you make it in the mystery world is word of mouth in the mystery bookstores.”

On the promotional tour for “Catering to Nobody” in 1990, she brought cookies called Dungeon Bars to her signings so people would go home with a good taste in their mouths. She made huge vats of the dough for these vanilla-rich cookies, baked them, froze them, then had them FedExed to each bookstore the day she arrived.

Friends advised her have the cookies baked locally, but during her “Dying for Chocolate” book tour in 1992, she was horrified to find low-fat brownies in one store. “I tasted the brownies and asked what they had done to them,” Davidson recalls. “They told me they had used margarine. And the thing is, I don’t want anybody to taste anything of mine that has margarine in it!”

The print run for Davidson’s previous book, “The Last Suppers,” was 35,000, and each of her books has sold more than the last one, a pattern that publishers look for when they are deciding whether or not to renew a mystery series. “I believe if I had not started taking Dungeon Bars to the mystery bookstores,” Davidson says, “it would never have happened for me.”

DUNGEON BARS

1 cup unsalted butter

2 eggs

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 tsps. vanilla

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 cup flour

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1 cup oats 1 cup raisins

Cream butter with brown and white sugars, then beat in eggs and vanilla, add flour, salt, baking soda. Stir in oats and raisins. Spread in greased 9-by-13-inch pan. Bake 30 minutes in oven preheated to 350 degrees. Cool slightly and cut into 32 bars.

IT WOULD TAKE A GOOD DEAL MORE THAN DUNGEON BARS TO account for the success of the potboilers churned out by author Mary Higgins Clark, whose position as the best-selling mystery author in America is both unchallenged and a source of considerable dismay to almost everyone working in the field except, of course, Mary Higgins Clark. With none of the constraints of a series to manage, Clark is free to write whatever comes into her head, and apparently she does. “It seems like she comes out with a book every six months,” says a prominent mystery author, “and then out she goes on the road again. She covers a lot of ground and she’s tireless, but I don’t know how hard she works at the writing anymore. I read her at intervals to see how she operates, to study her relationship to her public. That’s worth understanding.”

Those relationships are cultivated over many books, and then nurtured--carefully, if not always lovingly--by mystery writers intent as any rug salesmen upon doing whatever it takes to lure in the customers. Many authors attend the ever-multiplying cottage industry of mystery conventions out of a fear of losing market share. “To be accessible is real important for some people,” says Abigail Padgett. She considers this for a moment, then adds ruefully, “As many books as I’ve read, I never in my life wanted to meet the author of any of them.”

More than ever, publishers are determined to sign mystery authors who can write authoritatively about some segment of the job market. One mid-list author was recently dropped by a major publishing house, and could not get a contract with another until he put together a resume, not of his past books, but of his past jobs, in order to demonstrate his qualifications to write fiction.The price to be paid for this niche marketing is fiction that is often less novelistic than reportorial, the inevitable outcome of heedlessly advising a generation already histrionically self-absorbed to “write what you know.” At the Left Coast Crime convention in Boulder, this was evident during a weekend studded with such panel discussions as “We Feel Your Pain: Sleuths With Personal Baggage,” “The Male Private Eye: Going the Way of the Snail-Darter and Spotted Owl?” and the best-attended session of all, “ ‘G’ is for Gimmick: Making Your Series Stand Out From the Pack.”

Author Susan Moody, who writes two detective series--one about a female sleuth who is African English (Moody is English) and another set around the world of competitive bridge--becam so incensed at the very use of the G-word while sitting on the gimmick panel that she peremptorily dismissed their existence in her work. “If you say I use gimmicks, I’ll see yo outside after this is over,” Moody cooed threateningly at one point.The previous evening, however, Moody had been considerably less strident on the subject while speaking privately (she thought) with Padgett. “We were talking, and she says, “Yeah, I’ve got two gimmicks,”Padgett recalls. “I’ve got one [sleuth] who’s black and one who plays bridge. Those are my gimmicks.”

Over in the room where the authors with personal baggage were holding forth, members of the audience who stood up to comment were careful to point out that they themselves did not suffer from the dysfunction under discussion. Whatever it was. Panelist Lora Roberts, whose detective lives in a VW microbus while she is going through a transitional period, said her husband had asked her to mention that, unlike her sleuth Liz Sullivan, she is not a battered wife.

“The mystery community is a whole world unto itself, a very closely knit sub-group of the publishing world,” says Hyperion’s Bob Miller. “There are so many mysteries published each year that it would be easy for a new author to get lost in the crowd. That there are authors who do emerge is simply because these people all go to mystery conventions together, and they talk to each other about who’s really got the goods.” The conversation is often livelier than that. “It’s a community where everybody knows how to dispose of a body, and people discuss poisons over dinner,” says Sparkle Hayter, whose “Nice Girls Finish Last” is a lighthearted romp through the S&M; clubs of New York following the murder of her sleuth’s gynecologist. “And like any community, there’s always back-stabbing and jealousy. But I hear the romance writers are really vicious.”

And yet, even with that to recommend it, what romance convention could possibly produce such memorably monikered sob sisters as Taffy Cannon, Sparkle Hayter and Nevada Barr? All their real names! All in one murderous weekend! “I think with a name like Sparkle Hayter, you have no choice but to be both funny and homicidal,” says Hayter, who drew on her own background as a correspondent for CNN to fashion her series heroine, a tabloid-TV reporter. “This is a good way to do it without going to jail.”

In March, Barr released “Firestorm,” the fourth in her series about national park ranger/ sleuth Anna Pigeon, and how it performs will determine whether she breaks out of the vast ghetto of “category writers,” whose books sell only to loyal fans of the genre, and onto the bestseller lists. So far, “Firestorm” has sold 22,000 and is in its second printing. Meanwhile, Barr has not quit her day job as a law-enforcement ranger for the National Park Service in Mississippi. When she is on duty, she packs a 9 millimeter Sig-Sauer, and is trained as an emergency medical technician--both talents that have come into play in her books. “Nevada can shoot you and then resuscitate you,” says her editor at Putnam’s, Chris Pepe.

“I had written a bunch of mainstream novels,” Barr says. “Didn’t make a dime.” Now she cranks out a new mystery every year. Her contract calls for Anna Pigeon novels, “or nothin’ ” she says. “They don’t want you to screw up a good thing by running off and doing ‘art.’ ” Barr would like to write a historical mystery, but feels trapped by her own mounting success. “This is paying--it’s paying me, it’s paying Putnam’s, it’s paying my agent,” Barr says, “and they don’t want me to do anything else. I don’t know how long I can maintain the quality at a level I’ll be proud of. But you know for a fact that I’ll maintain this quality level until it runs out, and then I’ll sell a few more.”

AMONG THE FEW AUTHORS NOT baking cookies, knitting gun-cozies or handing out Louis Vuitton body bags to her fans is Patricia Cornwell, who recently signed a new contract with G.P. Putnam’s Sons that will pay her a reported $20 million for three books starring her medical examiner sleuth, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. The deal vaults Cornwell into the ranks of the best-paid novelists in the world, just behind legal thriller writer John Grisham and techno-thriller writer Tom Clancy.

Putnam’s itself had hoped to announce the new deal to help set the promotional buzz in motion for the release of Cornwell’s first book for that house, “Cause of Death,” which is due out in July. But Cornwell upstaged--and in the process infuriated--her own publisher by leaking the terms of the contract to a newspaper in Richmond, Va., where she lives. “She totally blindsided us,” says a Putnam’s executive. “We could have gotten a much bigger splash, but some people just seem to have a need for instant gratification.”

Cornwell had made her name by becoming a fixture on the bestseller lists while at Scribner’s, but only after receiving a fistful of rejection letters from other houses for “Postmortem,” her first Scarpetta mystery. It was not considered unusual that she left that venerable house for Putnam’s last year--loyalty, after all, is just as rare in publishing as it is in sports and filmmaking--but it was considered very bad form when she complained publicly that Scribner’s had treated her “like a mid-list author,” despite lavish promotional campaigns that helped make her books bestsellers.

“That’s ridiculous,” snarls one mystery editor at a rival New York publishing house. “Please don’t ask me about Patricia Cornwell. She’s dreadful, a really strange lady. I think she’s psychiatric, I really do.” Says another of Cornwell’s former friends in the business: “I was totally charmed by her. She could be so bright and so funny, and then she’d walk into a room and antagonize everybody in seconds.”

“During the launch of her books, Cornwell never failed to captivate the press with tales of her rise from the Virginia medical examiner’s office, where she was a computer programmer who voluntarily attended autopsies. Her homes--she has at least four--are tightly secured hives of motion detectors, surveillance cameras and stockpiles of guns. She has frequently discussed her own fear of crime (though she was unavailable to do so for this article), and was supposedly horrified to learn that a Florida man had been accused of strangling a woman using a technique described in “Postmortem,” which was found among his belongings.

“That’s about her dark side,” says Grafton. “I don’t know if it’s about the books.” Cornwell once identified Grafton as one of her best friends, then, according to people who know them both, Grafton didn’t hear from her for a year. “She is getting a little remote these days,” Grafton says carefully. “She’s interesting to me. There are many other opinions of her. I’m sure they make up stories about her, and then repeat them all to each other endlessly. She’s just one of those people.”

Cornwell generates some fairly baroque gossip. “She does inspire people’s passions,” says Susanne Kirk, the longtime mystery editor at Scribner’s who bought and edited Cornwell’s first six books. “I think a lot of people are jealous of her success. And I think it’s difficult to know whom you can trust when everybody seems to want something from you. You don’t know who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are.”

Some mystery booksellers are pretty sure they know who the bad guys are. “We invited her in for a book signing once,” says a local bookseller of Cornwell, “and before she would come into the store, her two bodyguards conducted a security sweep of the premises, in case anyone had showed up with an Uzi, I guess. She was rude and demanding from the moment she walked in. We would never have her back. I personally live for the day she ever asks me to do anything for her.” And Jim Huang, the respected bookman who owns Deadly Passions in Kalamazoo, Mich., says, “The advice I’ve been given by other booksellers is, ‘If the publisher offers to send Cornwell to your store, say no.’ Which says a lot, given how many books you would sell at an event like that.”

AT A TIME WHEN MANY small, independent bookstores have been muscled out of existence by such superstore behemoths as Barnes & Noble (which also owns Bookstar) and Borders, mystery shops like Huang’s have flourished by preaching to the already converted. When Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Bookshop opened in a 19th century Manhattan brownstone 17 years ago, there were only two or three mystery specific stores in the entire nation; now there are more than a hundred, including Book ‘em in South Pasadena.

Penzler once ran the Mysterious Press, which he founded in 1975, out of the six-story “mystery mansion,” until he sold the imprint to Warner Books. “He’s one of the reasons there is a mystery industry today,” says Taffy Cannon. Penzler believes mysteries have flourished almost precisely to the extent that the rest of contemporary fiction has failed to tell a story. “You have beautifully written, meticulously crafted sentences,” he says, “and you realize when it’s all over that nothing has happened. No one has changed, and you don’t know any more about the world, or that place, than you did when you started. By contrast, you can read ‘The Long Goodbye,’ and it will tell you so much about that time and place, the way the world thought and behaved, that you don’t need to read history books.”

The problem, of course, is that “The Long Goodbye” was published 43 years ago, and there has been little written since that approaches that summit. But even if there is no one talented enough to take “a cheap, shoddy, and utterly lost kind of writing, and [make] of it something that intellectuals claw at each other about,” as Chandler once credited himself with doing, there are more competently crafted mysteries being written each year than ever before. “To me, this is the great golden age of crime fiction,” Penzler says.

Authors from the literary mainstream occasionally attempt to wade into this drowning pool, looking for a little rough trade and a quick score. “I think they try it because it looks like there are some bucks there,” snorts Grafton. “I hope they understand how damned hard it is, and go back to Snootyville, or wherever they live.”

“The mystery is a very literate and sublime form,” she continues. “It can start with the blam, blam, blam blood and guts stuff, but to construct a story in which you make everything work, give it a point, give it atmosphere and give it pace, requires a very skilled manipulation of the elements of storytelling. I think because mysteries came out of pulp fiction, there’s still an attitude that it is the lesser form. People say to me all the time, “I don’t read mystery novels,” and it sounds like they’re saying, “I don’t go to the porn flicks.”

Grafton is among a handful of authors whose books ship as bestsellers, though she is wary of the company she sometimes keeps. “Sometimes being on the bestseller list puts you in a category with hack writers,” she says, without mentioning any names. “I am a very particular book reader myself, and sometimes when I realize that there are many mystery fans who lump us all together, it’s cause for some concern. I sit there saying, ‘Don’t you get the difference? Do you really think you can equate this writer with that writer?’ There are some readers who don’t seem to discern a difference in quality. I don’t think mysteries are the cheeses of literature anymore. It used to be you would take an armload and suck ‘em down, crunch, crunch, with no nutritional content whatsoever. But these days I believe they’re more substantial pieces of writing.”

She says she will never sell her books to Hollywood because she doesn’t want Kinsey corrupted, but Grafton is keenly aware of mystery publishing’s commercial imperative. She is among the cleverest and least abashed self-promoters in the game. “My mailing list is about 2,500 at this point, all people who have written to me and to whom I have written back,” she says. “I do two mailings a year, a Kinsey Millhone Christmas card, and I send out a little promotional item for each book that I design myself. ‘ ‘L’ is for Lawless’ ’ was a luggage tag, another time it was jar holders. People kill for these things.” The mystery world is no place for half measures.The mysterati, those people you see at the library checking out a dozen mysteries at a time, have the most education and the highest incomes of any book buyers in America, according to a survey Penzler commissioned when he was a publisher, and they read more than anybody else. “Go figure,” he says contentedly. When they aren’t reading, they are invariably chatting each other up for recommendations at such murderously time-consuming Internet sites as DorothyL (named for author Dorothy L. Sayers) and the Mysterious Homepage.DorothyL is what its founders--a pair of librarians named Diane K. Kovacs (known online, for reasons too mysterious to go into, as Harriet Vane) and Kara Robinson (a.k.a. Danger Mouse)--call “an electronic conference,” where mystery fans from 27 countries, not least of all Estonia and the Czech Republic, come together electronically with malice very much a forethought. “We just wanted a good place to talk about our favorite recreational activity,” Kovacs/Vane says, presumably referring to murder most foul.

The elongated successes of such series as Grafton’s compel not only the authors to write what they know, but the reader to read what he or she knows, and then read it all over again a year later. If it weren’t for the different colors of the dust jackets, after all, how would even the most discerning reader distinguish Dick Francis’ “Risk” from his “Proof,” or “Bolt” from “Break In” after more than 30 books about sleuths snooping around the world of horse racing? Walter Mosley’s series about the detective Easy Rawlins uses different colors in each title as a way of distinguishing one book from another, much as Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald did decades ago. At the other titular extreme is Southern belletrist Sarah Shankman, whose current book is “I Still Miss My Man But My Aim Is Getting Better.”

“If the authors are good, and they write a book a year,” says Penzler, “and if they have--I don’t want to be pejorative and say ‘if they write the same book’--but if they have similar characters, similar milieu, then the audience knows that if they liked that one, and the next one is like the last one, they’ll like it again. And they’ll keep coming back.”

James Lee Burke, who writes a series about a Cajun homicide detective named Dave Robicheaux, is what is known in the trade as a “literary author,” which means he writes in complex sentences. Burke published his first novel--a non-mystery--in 1965, then wrote “The Lost Get-Back Boogie,” which was rejected a hundred times, possibly because of that title, before it was published in 1986. When a friend who had written a crime novel suggested he try a mystery because it might be more salable, Burke wrote “Neon Rain,” the first in the Robicheaux series. It sold 4,000 copies.

The next book, “Heaven’s Prisoners,” matched that, and each book thereafter increased the size of Burke’s following. He followed his editor at Little, Brown to Hyperion, which then set about turning Burke into a household name. “One of the things we wanted to do in building ourselves as a publishing house was find a small group of mystery writers we believed in within the category, and bring them up to a larger audience,” says Miller. “The hope is to create our own stable of brand-name novelists someday, which requires an incredible investment of time and money over several years. It almost never happens in the course of a single publication.”

By 1993, Hyperion had gotten Burke’s sales up to 50,000 for “In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead,” no mean feat considering, once again, the title, and the fact that Burke refuses to fly. Authors’ book tours, already a test of endurance, turn positively medieval when the logistics must be plotted for a guy driving around the country all night in a car. “We’ve spent a great deal of time over the years looking at maps of the United States,” Miller says. A Hyperion publicist has one of those maps on her office wall, with cutout pictures of Burke’s face on it instead of colored pins.

“We have him do the West Coast, then drive all night, do the South, then drive all night, and work his way up the Eastern seaboard,” Miller says with a mirthless grin. “We move him around enough that we’ve gotten him on the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list, the Los Angeles Times list, the Washington Post list, but it had never happened coincident enough for him to be on national lists.”

Two years ago, however, Hyperion’s marketing department spotted an opening in the publishing schedule for August--not customarily Burke’s publication month but closer to the holiday book-buying period--and decided the time was right to break Burke out. “ ‘Before Dixie City Jam,’ we decided that was going to be the one,” Miller says. “Now that we had him up to sales of 50,000, we were either going to get stuck there, or make a list.” Bookstores that agreed to take more than the usual allotment of Burke’s books were sent “Dixie City Jam” T-shirts to give away with the books. And it worked. “Dixie City Jam” was on The New York Times bestseller list for four weeks.

Whatever that says about selling mysteries, mysteries continue to say a good deal more about the world in which they are formed. “An historian of the future,” wrote mystery author C.H.B. Kitchin, “will probably turn, not to blue books or statistics, but to detective stories if he wishes to study the manners of our age.”

Meanwhile, Grafton continues plowing through the alphabet, having started with “A” is for Alibi” in 1982, and projecting a finish date for “Z” in 2015, when she will be 75 years old. “Only death can stop me now,” she declares, sounding a lot like Kinsey Millhone. “I am very passionate about the mystery novel. For me, it’s a wonderful way of looking at society. I literally think of these books as private investigations. When you’re talking about the dark of the human heart, and crime, and violence, and our rage, you’ve got to have 26 stories to tell. And they’re good stories.”