Foreign menace strikes! Overseas crime novels are flooding U.S. shores, as American publishers show once again that they’re by no means immune to the herd mentality. Blame it on Stieg Larsson, the Wall Street Journal says. Although the author of the well-researched WSJ article identifies several good and likely reasons for the rise in interest in crime novels from overseas, she overlooks one important possibility, which I believe to be the overriding factor behind the trend: that U.S. crime writers have moved too far away from what readers like most in mysteries. These too-often missing elements are strong, well-motivated plot lines, plausible and well-paced stories, interesting central characters without too much psychological baggage (as the latter tends to bog down the story), a belief in the rightness of individuals paying for their crimes (without which the detection lacks importance), an intense interest in real-life problems and normal human motives (as opposed to the obsession with pathological weirdness in contemporary mysteries), imagination and a sense of joy in life (which is necessary in order for the crime to be an important disturbance), and other such characteristics of Golden Age detection fiction. Indeed, the WSJ writer’s praise for the premise that “much

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