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The topics: Timely.

Here's a book about missing persons. Over there, an examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the crash of a commercial airliner. A couple of books about race relations sit here.

Strange that all the books are in one section. Stranger still, for those who are not fans, the novels mentioned above -- Laura Lippman's "By a Spider's Thread," Nelson DeMille's "Night Fall," "Hard Revolution" by George Pelecanos and "Little Scarlet" by Walter Mosley -- are categorized as mystery or crime novels.

"I think that writers are realizing the power of the crime novel," says Michael Connelly, the best-selling author of the Harry Bosch detective series. "Obviously, it's got a very high commercial side to it -- if you write a crime novel, you're going to reach a wide audience. But they're also realizing the crime novel can be a mirror on society, and it can be a form of reflection and ask questions about where we're going."

Matters of style

In 1955, the best-selling novels included "Auntie Mame" by Patrick Dennis, "Andersonville" by MacKinlay Kantor, "No Time for Sergeants" by Mac Hyman and Herman Wouk's "Marjorie Morningstar." Not a single book among the Top 10 sellers for the year was a mystery or crime story or thriller.

Fifty years later, six of the Top 10 books on a recent New York Times best-sellers list are of the crime/mystery/thriller genre -- "The Broker" by John Grisham, J.D. Robb's "Survivor in Death," Michael Crichton's "State of Fear," "Conviction" by Richard North Patterson, "By Order of the President" by W.E.B. Griffin and Dan Brown's indefatigable "The Da Vinci Code."

"I think 50 years ago you would look at the literary novel as a reflection of World War II," Connelly says. "The crime novel, within months of 9/11, not only used it as a plot device, but used it to comment on how life is different. The Patriot Act, significant changes in our lives, are being discussed, questioned and explained in crime novels."

It's not that literary novels aren't addressing those topics. Whether directly -- Lorraine Adams' "Harbor" or Nicholas Ranaldi's "Between Two Rivers" -- or allegorically -- as in Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" and Thomas Keneally's "The Tyrant's Novel" -- provincial concerns and geopolitics continue to influence writers.

But crime novels seem to more easily tap into the current angst.

"In a post-9/11 world, the crime novel reminds us of our vulnerabilities in an uncertain world," says William Edwards, an associate professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco who uses crime novels in his classes.

"It is the intrigue of everyday life that gets our attention and provides substance for our reflections on the world we live in," Edwards says. "The routine hardly seems interesting. It is that which is not routine that draws our attention. The reflective life is not one contemplating the routine."

Crossing genres

Last year, Mosley and Pelecanos released novels in which race relations were a central theme. Mosley's "Little Scarlet" was set during the 1965 race riots in Los Angeles and featured Easy Rawlins, his Raymond Chandler-esque private investigator. Pelecanos' "Hard Revolution" was a prequel to his Derek Strange series, following the Washington, D.C.-based private eye from 1959 to the capital's race riots in 1968.

Neither novel can be easily pigeonholed.

"Are George's Derek Strange books, are they a crime-novel quartet or a social-novel quartet?" says Dennis Lehane, the author of "Mystic River" and "Shutter Island." "A bunch of us who came along around the same time, I don't think we were consciously doing this. I think it just became an organic process. Something about the genre just lends itself to an examination of social issues."

Lehane isn't sure whether crime and mystery novels have any specific elements that lend themselves to social commentary. And, he says, the current generation of writers who are increasingly topical -- himself, Connelly, Pelecanos, Ian Rankin, Laura Lippman, S.J. Rozan -- aren't "reinventing the wheel."

Sarah Weinman, a crime fiction writer and columnist whose blog, "Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind," features links to crime and mystery novels, agrees that mysteries and thrillers are not unique in their topical concerns.

"Because mystery novels focus on murder, violence and the aftereffects of such acts, right away they examine differences of class, family structure and social imbalance," Weinman says. "But what the best books in the genre do is take their cues from the social novels of old and concentrate more on character and motivation and less on furthering the plot along. The influence of John O'Hara, Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, and those that followed them, is just as important, if not more, than (that of) Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler now."

Crime and mystery novels, however, seem more reflective of real-life events and situations if only because their subject matter is a newspaper or television news broadcast away. It's easy to make the jump from the celebrity trials of Robert Blake and Michael Jackson into Grisham's courtrooms. Highly publicized bank heists or insurance scams provide entree into the crime capers of Donald Westlake or Elmore Leonard. And every time FBI agents make drug busts or CIA operatives are called to Capitol Hill, it gives credence to the books of April Smith and Daniel Silva.

Crime novels also catalog human failure and frailty. Kathleen George, a professor in the University of Pittsburgh's theater arts department, and the author of the suspense novels "Fallen" and "Taken," thinks the genre depends on the staples of theater: lying and pretending.

"And so they are closer to 'scene work' -- scene writing in plays in which there are people at cross purposes," George says. "That is, people relating to people with a problem, a conflict, a lie in the middle. The most intimate and novelistic novels often go very interior. But crime novels tend toward the more exterior conflicts."

Says Edwards: "By its very nature, crime fiction is about conflict situations. As sociologists, we argue that conflict provides room for debate and critique. It is this feature of crime fiction that allows it to be a window onto society and gives it a uniqueness in fiction."

Heroes and villains

From the inception of the United States, both history and lore have been filled with larger-than-life figures. George Washington, Andrew Carnegie, Amelia Earhart and Muhammad Ali are heroes of different sorts, but nonetheless reflections of the country's image.

"Heroes are symbols of how a nation wishes others to see it," Edwards says. "The hero represents triumph and affirms the goodness in the nation."

In the post-9/11 world, Edwards says, the crime novel simultaneously reminds us of our shortcomings while positioning "heroes" as defenders, "the nation's counterbalance force," Edwards says. Those heroes could be DeMille's contrarian John Corey, a former N.Y.P.D. detective assigned to a joint task force on terrorism, or Connelly's Bosch and his unwavering devotion to justice.

Crime novels, while satisfying the need for justice, also are essentially human. While George thinks people are basically alike regardless of geography -- "we share something with the best human beings and the worst," she says -- she agrees there might be something historical in the genre's popularity in this country.

"If America, more than other places, has a fascination with crime as part of our heritage, it might be because we are big and sprawling, a society that is bent on finding the good life," George says. "There are places in the world less driven than we are. And with a certain relaxation of the status quo, I would think (there would be) less crime. But that's just a guess."

Weinman, however, says the genre's appeal stems from the primal urge to "create order out of chaos, to find a resolution in the face of violent situations."

"This doesn't mean that crime novels have to follow conventional patterns -- and many of the best in recent years certainly do not -- but whatever conflicts are presented are, for the most part, resolved," he says.

Golden again

The golden age of mystery and crime fiction is generally acknowledged to be the period from 1920 until the end of the 1930s, when Agatha Christie, Hammett, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner were at their creative peaks.

It's not beyond reason to think that, 70 years later, the same concurrence of talent and innovation is reoccurring.

Lehane agrees that this is a special time for the genre.

"If you measure 'Golden Age' by popularity, crime fiction certainly does rank among best sellers, and crime fiction writers are well-known figures," says Edwards, who chaired "Sociology Meets the Mystery Writer" with writers Connelly, Rozan, Barbara D'Amato and Paula Woods as panelists during the 2002 convention of the American Sociological Association. "This is especially a great period for female crime fiction writers."

Weinman is less certain, saying it is hard to make such a statement until a few decades have past.

"But I do believe that the genre has never had so many talented writers working at the same time," she says, "and there's still room for more."

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