Ann Rule's "Last Dance, Last Chance" (which contains a few true-crime stories) is good. "Devil in the White City" has been in my to-be-read stack for a while. Someday ... I also Tivo a few "48 Hours"-type crime shows on TV. (I once looked at what I had stored up on my Tivo and thought, gee, what would people assume about me when they came in to claim my body and clean out my home?!) If you can find any of Edna Buchanan's 2 early books -- "Never Let Them See You Cry" and "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face" -- those are great. (There's also "Carr," about a rapist/killer.) She won a Pulitzer for breaking-news reporting (crime) for the Miami Herald. Then started writing a string of crime fiction books.

Russ, I think men can write "girl books." Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar is very much a girl book, I think. While I know they are not great literature, a number of Gothic suspense novels have been written by male writers under feminine pseudonyms -- I guess the thinking of the publishers was women prefer to read Gothics by what they think are women writers, which I think in the case of most female readers is bosh. A number of female writers have written quite effectively in the traditionally male bastion of war stories. Olivia Manning's recounting of the Battle of El Alamein in The Levant Trilogy is every bit as good as any male writer's, and Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy is much lauded by both male and female readers. However, whatever the inroads female writers have made, I'm afraid that there's a certain segment of male readers who will pass over their books simply because they are females. An androgynous name, such as Barker's, has probably pulled in some unsuspecting male readers. As for the classics you mentioned, Russ: Tolstoy's and Flaubert's books -- even when their protagonists are women -- are more likely to be read by men than Jane Austen's novels are. Anyanka has already talked above about this disinclination of boys and men. I know present male company is excepted, but it's hard to say it's untrue of male readers in general.

elliottb, oh my, I'm afraid you will think you've released a torrent once I get started. But here goes: The Diary of "Helena Morley" by Minha Vida de Menina, translated from Portuguese by poet Elizabeth Bishop, is a favorite. The precocious adolescent diarykeeper reported three years of her family life and the goings-on in her provincial Brazilian mining town in the late 1800s. Interspersed among amusing, trenchant, and matter-of-fact -- but nevertheless fascinating -- observations of everyday life and special events, she expounded on Brazilian politics, as she understood them. Her diary name came about because she had an English grandmother. Speaking of Elizabeth Bishop: One Art: Letters is very fine. I have a special fondness for women's letters. I really should read more letters written by men, though; so if you have any suggestions, please post them. I think I've read through twice now all nine volumes of the Kenneth L. Holmes-edited series, Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trail. Those start in the 1840s and end in the 1880s. I've also enjoyed other women's letters of the American West, especially Elinore Pruitt Stewart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader. More generally there is 800 Years of Women's Letters edited by Olga Kenyon. The variety there is astounding, to me. I've reread Mary Chesnut's Civil War a couple of times. Someone on another thread mentioned Polly Longworth's Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair & Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd that I read and reread voyueristically, I'm afraid. Just to mention a few more: The Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870 - Lisa Norling Diary of a Country Parson, 1758-1802 by J. Woodforde The Wilderness Journals of Everett Ruess edit by W.L. Rusho The Diary of George Templeton Strong by Strong, of course! The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 by William L. Shirer Two great anthologies of bits and pieces from people's diaries: The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists edited by Irene Taylor and Alan Taylor A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries by Thomas Mallon I better stop!

Lawrence Sanders has a series of books featuring his gad-fly detective Archie McNally, they are dated now, Sanders died in 1998, but they are funny and easy reading, def fall into the "pre-cell phones" genre. Bonus: many are available at thrift shops and other cheap places to get good reads. J.A. Jance, her series is set in Arizona and pretty good as well (definitely not as funny as Sanders tho). Some are pre-cell, some newer. Ditto on the thrift shop option. Carl Hiaasen, his novels aren't a series per se, but contain some recurring characters, as a bonus, he skewers South Florida and its denizens, capturing it perfectly (I traveled there quite often in the day, and know it well). TBH his earlier book are the funniest, but I read everything he writes, I appreciate his wit and humor. Some pre-cell, some newer. Joseph Wambaugh, a retired cop, who has written some really good, and funny, crime books (yeah, humor is very important to me), all pre-cell, I think. David Simon and Ed Burns, the creative duo who brought us the Earth's best TV show, The Wire, are both authors of true crime books, tho not necessarily whodunits, more like sprawling, sad, true-to-life stories, just like their TV shows.