Jason Rosenhouse over at EvolutionBlog is writing an (at least) two part series on locked room mysteries and his favorite authors, along with some less favorite ones. I usually read Jason’s blog for evolutionary science, but he also frequently writes quite vigorously on atheism, and he gets some of that in here.

I was not acquainted with John Dickson Carr, which he says exposes a large hole in my literary education. To be honest, I can’t recall any of my literature teachers pointing me in the direction of mysteries, at least relatively modern ones. I found those all on my own.

For the moment I will only add that I think often that the quality of characters in a novel is substantially in the eye of the beholder. A writer rarely writes all the details, yet sometimes we fill them out as full characters and sometimes we do not. For example, I find Dorothy Sayers’ characters more interesting than her plots, which seems to be the opposite of Jason’s view.

Nonetheless, any post that points out good authors I haven’t ever heard of is worth reading.