Stop You’re Killing Me (SYKM) is a website dedicated to crime fiction books. Its index at the top of every page can connect you with mysteries and thrillers of nearly 5,900 authors, both contemporary and from the past.
It is a valuable resource. I have been using SYKM multiple times a month for the last 18 years.
At times you will wonder why you cannot find a specific author in the SYKM index. Here are possible reasons:
1) Consider the scope of the task for building and maintaining the SYKM website … with just two editors.
Here is what the editors had to say about their task in their FAQ section:
The genesis of SYKM was the desire to read books in order, series or non-series, so we focus on authors who have several books to list. Generally we put authors with only one or two books on a “watch list” until they have more titles scheduled for publication.
We get many suggestions by email, from authors, readers, publishers, and publicists. The more information you provide, the more likely it is that a new author will be considered — while we add a few hundred authors each year, we get a thousand or two suggestions annually. There are thousands of historical authors we don’t have listed, and with the burgeoning self-publishing options in recent years, there will continue to be thousands and thousands of living authors we don’t list.
2) An author only wrote one mystery or thriller book, and at least 5 years have passed with no more books.
It’s possible that the SYKM editors never heard about the book, right? Given the volume of new plus older books from the earlier 20th century in the thousands… which few folks have occasion to find.
OR, the author was listed, but moved out of the main index after 5 years with no 2nd book. SYKM calls these “Dormouse Authors,” and they could be listed on a single page, identified as a dot after the “Z” in the index.
3) SYKM editors have determined that the author is not a crime fiction author.
Keep in mind that “my” definition of what qualifies as “a mystery” is spelled out in detail; the fencing for what is allowed into my field or corral of mysteries and thrillers is clear. And, it is the same as that of the SYKM editors except in one significant way — they include some “true crime” authors in their listings while I prefer to expel “true crime” from the perimeters of my definition, since I embrace the term “crime fiction” as the best way of describing my “corral” of preferred books.
But we agree that books that are clearly in the fantasy or horror genre shouldn’t be included. And that authors with novels that may have mysterious aspects, but no crime or injustice to be resolved, are not going to be listed in SYKM. And yet…
Some authors write both crime fiction (mysteries and/or crime thrillers) AND also write books in other genres. In that case, the editors will either:
• List the crime fiction books only, or
• List the crime fiction books and then designate other books specifically as “Other Fiction” – meaning not mysteries or crime thrillers. They are just being generous. Here is one example:
Some books are hard to categorize. I have argued that Moriarty’s Here One Moment belongs in the “Other Fiction” category.
4) Some authors use “pen names” which might be confusing.
For example, Nora Roberts is the pen-name for a best-selling and renown author of romance fiction; she has written over 200 books. Her real name is Eleanor Marie Robertson. A lot of her more recent romance novels have a blend of fantasy; a mix of two different genres.
She was well into her success as a romance novelist in 1994-95, when she decided to begin a series of detective stories featuring Eve Dallas, a homicide lieutenant in a futuristic New York City. A blend of crime fiction and the sci-fi genre. For this, she created another pen name, J. D. Robb. Of the many books by this writer, only the Eve Dallas stories are in SYKM. For only they meet the criteria of crime fiction.
