8 Mystery and Thriller Books about Authors

Mid-list crime author Ethelred Tressider gets a surprise when fellow mystery writer Henry Holiday turns up on his doorstep. He becomes more alarmed when Holiday admits that he may be guilty of murdering a fellow creator of detective stories. 

The only trouble is, it was on New Year’s Eve and Holiday was too drunk to remember things clearly. He asks Tressider to investigate on his behalf.

Teaming up with his editor, Elsie Thirkettle, Ethelred is soon on the trail of the true killer. 

Crooked Herring is a witty, cozy crime caper that’s full of sly insights into the writing life.

Under the pen name Jane Haddam, Orania Papaloziglou wrote a highly entertaining series of mysteries featuring romance author Patience McKenna. In this, the second, Patience is hired by the amoral Alida Brookfield to work for her new venture, Writing Enterprises. 

The business is designed to exploit the ambitions of would-be writers for profit. Patience knows Brookfield is a shady character, but she certainly doesn’t expect her first day to begin with the discovery of a dead body in a cupboard. 

Packed with colorful characters and with a plot that knits together nicely, Wicked, Loving Murder is a great introduction to a fine series.

Crime writer Darrell Brooke was known as The King of Suspense until a near fatal car accident left him with limited powers of concentration. Embittered and alone, Brooke finds redemption through his estranged granddaughter, Kaitlan. 

She’s a reformed drug addict with a grisly tale to tell—her former boyfriend is a serial killer who is being protected by his police chief father. It’s the sort of plot the King of Suspense might have dreamed up in his heyday, and now he and Kaitlan work together to bring about a satisfying real-life denouement to the story. 

Best-selling author Brandilyn Collins is celebrated for her breakneck suspense style and readers certainly need to buckle their seatbelts for this one.

The surly, truculent and brilliant former-Scotland Yard detective Daniel Hawthorne needs a ghost-writer to cover the case he is working on. An admirer of the BBC TV series Foyle’s War, he decides the writer he needs is that drama’s creator, Anthony Horowitz. 

So begins a deliciously witty and meta collaboration in which the author Anthony Horowitz writes a mystery featuring the author Anthony Horowitz, who’s a blundering impediment to everything Hawthorne tries to achieve. 

The cleverness wouldn’t matter much if the story—a woman found dead after arranging her own funeral—wasn’t well plotted, but it most definitely is.

Korelitz’ brilliantly dark psychological suspense novel centers on Jake Finch Bonner, once the promising young author of a praiseworthy first novel, now a struggling creative writing teacher watching his bright future slowly slip down the drain. 

Bonner’s feelings of failure are exacerbated when an arrogant pupil, Evan Parker, boastfully outlines the plot of what seems certain to be a blockbuster book. But then Parker dies and Bonner makes a fateful decision to appropriate Parker’s story and write the book himself. 

It’s an instant hit, and Bonner is soon living the literary high life. There’s only one problem: somebody out there knows his secret.

Cleverly devised and as sharp as a laser, Korelitz tale of plagiarism is a modern classic.

Satterfield’s richly atmospheric and eerie modern Gothic suspense novel centers on the increasingly intertwined relationship between reclusive best-selling author Vida Winter and Margaret Lea, the writer she has hired to pen her allegedly true authorized biography. 

After years of spinning yarns about her past to gullible journalists, Winter insists that she is going to be completely honest with Lea, but will answer no questions. 

The stories she proceeds to tell of her strange upbringing in an isolated country house open up ever greater mysteries about her life, mysteries that Lea becomes determined to solve.

When 25-year-old bookstore stockroom boy Cal Cunningham writes a first novel that sells to Hollywood for millions of dollars, rival authors are stunned and envious. How could someone who has apparently never written so much as a short story in his life have miraculously come up with such a blockbuster? 

Cal’s big problem is that there is one person on the planet aside from him who knows the answer. And, whoever they may be, they are determined to get their share of his new found riches. 

Calapinto’s book is a smart, tense, sharply written thriller filled with knowing literary allusions.

Britain’s blue-stocking Queen of Crime created Harriet Vane, a sharp-witted and independent-minded mystery writer and eventually the wife of her lead detective, Lord Peter Wimsey.

In this classic whodunit from 1935, Vane takes centre stage when the Dean of the snooty Oxford College she once attended calls her in to investigate an outbreak of vandalism, obscene messages, and poison-pen letters. 

Vane protests, but with Wimsey unavailable, she reluctantly takes on the detective work. Using her writer’s keen eye for a red herring, an unexpected plot twist and an unlikely culprit, she eventually—with a little help from her boyfriend—uncovers a malicious conspiracy against a vulnerable student. 

This is one of Sayer’s best novels, and leaves you wishing she’d given Vane more cases to handle.