Unexpected Discoveries Are the Best
Have you ever been surprised by a piece of pop culture?
It happened to me this week. My wife and I attended a concert on Monday. The names on the bill were Howard Jones, ABC, and Richard Blade. I knew Jones and had already seen him once, decades ago, but hadn’t listened to his music in a while. Driving to downtown Houston, we listened to HoJo’s greatest hits and I discovered I still knew most of the words to his song—and could still play a mean steering wheel keyboard. His set was fantastic, and I especially appreciated his changing up nearly every song, making the live experience something special rather than “just the record played live and loud.”
Richard Blade is a DJ on Sirius XM’s First Wave station and I wasn’t really sure what he was going to do. Turned out, he gave the audience a history of English New Wave synth pop, complete with a presentation and sound drops, that was so utterly entertaining that I wanted him to keep going after his forty-five minutes were up.
ABC was the revelation. I could name you exactly one song, “Be Near Me,” before Monday night. Well, I actually knew two songs, but I never equated the band as the singer of “Poison Arrow.” But the rest of the fourteen-song set, led by vocalist Martin Fry, was fantastic.
One song in particular, “Viva Love,” really captured my ear on the first listen. The next day, I jumped on YouTube to find a live version so I could listen again. Then, I found out it was from the 2016 album, The Lexicon of Love II, and I listened to that album. The gorgeous orchestrations and Fry’s crooner style is right up my audio alley. Played it for the wife that evening and ended the week having purchased the record.
Which naturally brings up the question: how had I missed this band and album?
Because there is simply too much out there to know everything. And this applies to books and authors as well.
Discovering New-to-Me Books and Authors
A few years ago, I became curious about cozy mysteries. It being December, I selected a book with a cover that looked to merge my love of Christmas, Hallmark movies, and mysteries: David Rosenfelt’s Dachshund in the Snow. My preconceived ideas were all cutesy things where the titular hound solves the case. I was prepared for saccharine.
Didn’t get it.
What I got was a traditional mystery, yes, but nowhere near cozy. The likable narrator and main character, Andy Carpenter, is a chip off the block of past detectives like Donald Lam and Archie Goodwin. I’ve now read eight of the Carpenter series, having circled back to the first one.
Sticking with the cozy genre, I started reading the Lucy Stone series by Leslie Meier because each one of her titles links up with a holiday. It’s a perfect marketing plan, one I used with my own first Christmas mystery. Again, I thought I was going to get a bunch of tropes from what seem to populate cozy mysteries. What I got was a plucky lead character who is a reporter, wife, and mom who has to juggle all those things while she keeps digging to discover the truth behind recent deaths. I think I’ve now read five.
Most recently, I delved into the Myron Bolitar novels of Harlan Coben. All I knew about Coben was his modern, twisty thrillers—although I’ve never read one. When I purchased his BBC class to learn how he writes his books, I reckoned I ought to read one. Deal Breaker was quite good, and blew away all my preconceived ideas of how you can have a sports agent lead a detective series.
What have been some of your unexpected discoveries, either in books, music, or movies?