The game was afoot at the Mokena Library last week.
A trail of orange and black construction paper footprints led 20-plus mystery fans to the lair of “Sleuths on the Loose,” otherwise known as mystery novelists Mark Zubro and Hugh Holton, who were hiding out, complete with black baseball caps and mirrored sunglasses, in the library’s lower level community room.
Mokena was the 10th stop on a 12 library tour sponsored by the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind & Physically Handicapped to take the mystery out of “talking books.”
Zubro and Holton were tapped for the tour because readers’ “favorite genres are mysteries, westerns and romances,” said Barb Perkis. Perkis, acting director of the Regional Library, got into the spirit of the event by peering through a magnifying glass and donning a fedora to introduce the writers.
“The mystery (fiction) world has expanded immensely” from the standard picturesque British villages and gritty American cities that dominated the genre’s early years to include varied backdrops in cities, suburbs and exotic foreign locales, Zubro said.
Prim and proper amateurs and wisecracking tough guys have company that includes hard-working police officers, medieval monks, schoolteachers and some pretty tough women.
Mystery writers have a wide variety of day jobs, too.
Zubro teaches English and reading to 8th graders at Summit Hill Junior High School in Frankfort Square. Holton is a watch commander in the Chicago Police Department’s 2nd District at 51st Street and Wentworth Avenue.
“I come from a police family,” said Holton, whose books feature police officers considerably brighter than the bumbling officers who trailed around after Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade.
One of Zubro’s books, featuring a high school English teacher as sleuth, grew from a dark premise–finding a dead body in a classroom.
Sometimes the original idea changes as Holton starts writing, he said. The wife of the serial killer in “Windy City” just kind of “took over the book,” he said.
Both writers like to feature the local landscape, but they make changes to fit the plot.
Holton set one book in a museum modeled on the Museum of Science and Industry, but gave it a different name “because I wanted different stuff in my museum.”
Zubro’s suburban settings only resemble Mokena. If he puts a real town in his book, “I can’t put things where I want to. . . .”
But some local landmarks show up in both writers’ books.
Chicago settings are fresher than some others, Holton said. “There’s not a lot to read about Chicago.”