Pick a Category, Any Category

A new year means another Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge sponsored by my pal Bev at My Reader's Block.  How do you like that new logo for the challenge?  It's from the UK publisher T.V. Boardman's "Bloodhound Mystery" series of books by hardboiled American writers.

This year the challenge is modeled on the party game Scattergories. We pick eight different categories from the list of over 30 and read one book that applies to each. Here's what I plan on doing:

1. World Traveler: one mystery set in any country except the US or Britain
2. Staging the Crime: a mystery set in the entertainment world (the theater, musical event, a pageant, Hollywood, featuring a magician, etc)
3. Cops & Robbers: a book that features a theft rather than murder
4. Murder on the High Seas: a mystery involving water
5. Things That Go Bump in the Night: something spooky, creepy, Gothic in the title
6. Psychic Phenomena: a mystery featuring a seance, medium, hypnotism, or other psychic or "supernatural" characters/events
7. Book to Movie:  a mystery that has appeared on screen (feature film or TV movie)
8. Killed in Translation: Works that originally appeared in another language and have been made available in English

We're all welcome to read more than eight books. Once I'm finished the minimum eight I'm hoping I'll double or triple the total. But I'm not making any promises this year.  Look at yesterday's post here to see how I nearly dug myself a trap and fell in. I picked a few categories that will present somewhat of a challenge, especially the "Cops & Robbers" category with its emphasis on theft. Surprisingly, last year I found two of those without even trying.