AP Photo/illustration by Hank Barrow

We're rolling toward Labor Day, which means so-called "beach reads" have had their season in the sun and now it's time for "serious literature" to step forward. At least that was the way publishers traditionally thought, before genres started mashing together and books became difficult to categorize.

That means you won't have any trouble finding a new mystery or suspense tale to read as we hit autumn. There's also this: you don't have to depend solely on bookstores' "New Titles" lists for great new finds, because even the best-known writers have published novels that have unfairly fallen through the cracks over the years.

We're concentrating on those older works here. As fall approaches, we take an expansive view of what constitutes a mystery/suspense novel and recommend the following lesser-known efforts by established authors.

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Diana Abu-Jaber

"Origin," 2007. The Portland State creative-writing professor made her name with lush, homey literary works ("Crescent"), but then she moved into genre fiction with this story about a Syracuse crime-lab worker investigating mysterious infant deaths. "The cops in 'Origin' behave less like cops than like novelists -- they're short on legwork, long on waiting for inspiration," wrote The New York Times. This can actually be a good thing -- for readers, if not the crime victims in this fictional version of Syracuse.

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Detail from the cover of "Colonel Sun."

Kingsley Amis

"Colonel Sun," 1968. Ian Fleming's death couldn't stop the James Bond literary franchise. The first new 007 novel in the post-Fleming world: "Colonel Sun," written by "Lucky Jim" author Kingsley Amis under the pseudonym Robert Markham. "At first, 'Colonel Sun' appears to be a super-faithful quasi-pastiche, opening (like 'Goldfinger') with 007 wielding a putter," The Guardian wrote. "But after that, everything gets very perplexing." How so? Amis embraced Bondian savoir faire and doubled-down on action (there's a particularly gruesome torture scene), but there are whiffs of right-wing politics throughout and a lot of ethnic stereotyping. Most perplexing of all, noted The Paris Review: "there is surprisingly little sex in 'Colonel Sun.'"

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Margaret Atwood

"The Blind Assassin," 2000. "The Handmaid's Tale" author struggled to get bestseller-list traction with this sprawling novel, thanks to its narrative complexity. The New York Times headlined its review, "Wheels Within Wheels," and its reviewer called the book "overlong and badly written." But not everyone agreed with the newspaper of record, and the novel has slowly worked its way toward cult status. Wrote The Guardian about "Assassin": "Atwood has always sought to collapse and subvert different genres, so it isn't surprising that her family saga should encompass pulp sci-fi, clue-strewn detective novel, newspaper reportage and tragic confessional romance."

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Detail from the cover of "The Triumph of Evil."

Lawrence Block

"The Triumph of Evil," 1971. Miles Dorn is a retired assassin enjoying a quiet, contemplative life in this paperback original written under the pseudonym Paul Kavanagh. But inevitably Dorn is lured back into the game with an assignment that could tip the U.S. into civil unrest, maybe even a full-blown revolution. "Kavanagh builds up a situation that will have the reader nodding in agreement," The New York Times wrote. "It can indeed happen here."

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Don DeLillo

"Running Dog," 1978. What if the Nazis in Hitler's bunker -- maybe even including Der Fuhrer and Eva Braun -- took part in orgies as Berlin exploded around them at the end of World War II? And what if there were movies of the debauchery hidden away somewhere? Weirdo collectors would be interested. So would journalists. They might cheat, blackmail and even kill to get hold of the film. Such is the premise of this odd, sex-filled mystery novel. When asked in 2007 if he was trying to write "genre material" with "Running Dog," DeLillo responded: "I knew I wasn't doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way."

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Didion in 1979. (AP)

Joan Didion

"The Last Thing He Wanted," 1996. Didion made her name in the 1960s and '70s as a journalist and cultural critic. "Writers are always selling somebody out," she famously wrote. By the 1980s she had embraced fiction, but critics weren't sure it measured up to her journalism. The heroine of "Last Thing" is a woman who, wrote The New York Times, "not only walks out of a life -- as a California wife and mother, and then as a reporter for The Washington Post -- but she also walks into another one, which is the ruin of her father's, a life of shabby, shadowy deals, of arms and conspiracies." The Los Angeles Times pointed out that the novel's theme is an extension of her nonfiction work: "The point of her book is that there is no clear line between 'respectable' reasons of state and what the vicious murderers do."

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Detail from the cover of "The Invisible Circus."

Jennifer Egan

"The Invisible Circus," 1995. In the first novel by the author of "A Visit From the Goon Squad," Faith O'Connor is a young free spirit in the late 1960s -- until she plunges off a cliff in Italy. A decade later, her younger sister Phoebe follows in Faith's footsteps, traveling across Europe in an attempt to figure out the mystery of her sibling's death. "Circus" is a meditative character study, but "the novel is surprisingly suspenseful," wrote The Independent. "... Egan's prose hurtles further down the rabbit hole, sentences extending into a stream of (very expanded) consciousness."

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Detail from the cover of "The Twenty-Seventh City."

Jonathan Franzen

"The Twenty-Seventh City," 1988. The first novel by the author of "The Corrections" tells the weird, portentous story of a deadpan Indian police commissioner who becomes St. Louis' top law-enforcement officer and then, for some reason, launches an intricate undercover operation to take over the city and county. It's a novel that can be hard to love. "Some books ought to be allowed to molder in peace," Slate wrote when it was reissued. But "The Twenty-Seventh City" also has an unmistakable power. Offered Publishers Weekly: "Literate, sophisticated, funny, fast-paced, it's a virtuoso performance that does not quite succeed, but it will keep readers engrossed nonetheless."

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Detail from the cover of "Fools Die on Friday."

Erle Stanley Gardner

"Fools Die on Friday," 1947. Best known for his Perry Mason stories, Gardner also wrote a series of novels featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, who The Thrilling Detective website calls "one of the all-time great mismatched team-ups in detective fiction." Gardner, who wrote the Cool & Lam books under the name of A.A. Fair, wasn't much of a prose stylist. But he knew how to push a story forward. Wrote Mystery File's Francis S. Nevins about "Fools Die": "There's very little detection in this opus, but the pace is furious (as usual with Gardner) and the climax, with one character literally getting away with murder, would never have been allowed in a contemporaneous Perry Mason novel."

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Detail from the cover of "No Way to Treat a Lady."

William Goldman

"No Way to Treat a Lady," 1964. The Academy Award-winning writer would go on to pen the suspense classics "Marathon Man" and "Magic," but this surprisingly funny serial-killer novel -- "horror served sunnyside-up," the back cover promised -- was his first foray into genre fiction. His editor was so fearful that "No Way to Treat a Lady" would ruin Goldman's burgeoning literary reputation that he recommended it be published under a pseudonym. (Goldman chose Harry Longbaugh, the real name of Wild West outlaw The Sundance Kid -- he was working on the screenplay for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.") The upshot, said the author: "['No Way to Treat a Lady'] came out and got the best reviews of anything I've ever been connected with."

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Detail from the cover of "Hangsaman."

Shirley Jackson

"Hangsaman," 1951. With her second novel, "The Lottery" author offered up a creepy story "loosely based on the real-life disappearance of a Bennington College sophomore in 1946." But the novel is like no genre fiction you've ever read. The Rumpus pointed out that reading it "is like entering a dark labyrinth, only to discover that you have always been in it, and that the novel has merely awakened you to this fact, something you have tried all your life to forget."

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Detail from the cover of "Thinner."

Stephen King

"Thinner," 1984. Is it possible for a Stephen King novel to be obscure? King sure tried with this slim novel, publishing it under a pseudonym complete with a fake author photo and limited marketing budget. King's prose style and imagination, however, are pretty easy to spot -- even pre-publication reviews of "Richard Bachman's" debut compared it to the bestselling horror master. Kirkus Reviews called the story of a man wasting away after being cursed by a gypsy "often illogical or implausible" but praised the novel as "lively, unpretentious horror overall, with a few genuine chills and more than a little of Stephen King's crude/disarming, contemporary zip."

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John le Carre

"The Naïve and Sentimental Lover," 1971. In this, Le Carre's most personal and autobiographical novel, an unhappily married entrepreneur falls in with a glamorous couple, and the threesome spins into a web of sexual gamesmanship. "A confident, resilient entertainment which works best as a showy shell game," wrote Kirkus Reviews. The novel's chief mystery: Why there are no spies to be found anywhere in it.

Want to know about le Carre's real-life affair that led to this novel? Read all about it here.

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George R.R. Martin

"The Armageddon Rag," 1983. Kirkus Reviews wasn't impressed when this novel first hit shelves, dismissing it as "simpleminded, heavy-going nostalgia for the Sixties-rock counterculture -- gotten up as lurid melodrama, with a murky mixture of psycho-whodunit, conspiracy-thriller, and (in the feverish, limp final chapters) vague occultery." The novel bombed commercially as well as critically. Years later, Martin's success with the "Game of Thrones" series brought a critical reevaluation of "Rag." In 2013, Mark Young wrote in The Los Angeles Review of Books that he found himself "spellbound by the vividness and multidimensionality of Martin's evocations" of the 1960s music scene.

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Cormac McCarthy

"Outer Dark," 1968. The Rhode Island native won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Road" and a National Book Award for "All the Pretty Horses." Before these and other iconic McCarthy works ("Blood Meridian," "No Country for Old Men"), there was this brutal allegorical novel about a 19-year-old Appalachian woman who goes in search of her baby, fathered by her brother. "The plot is like the finding by a malevolent hand the thread that knits the world," The New York Times wrote. "Page by page it plucks the stitches loose until the fabric parts in a catastrophe so awful that one's eyes leave the page by sheer reflex."

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Detail from thte cover of "The Cement Garden."

Ian McEwan

"The Cement Garden," 1978. Thanks to "Amsterdam," "Atonement" and subsequent novels, McEwan's early work -- novels and short stories that earned him the nickname Ian McAbre -- has receded into the literary background. Which is a shame, because every McEwan book deserves the spotlight. When an interviewer asked him in 2014 about the darkness of "The Cement Garden," his first novel, his response was, well, macabre. "I don't know about words like dark," he said. "I thought it was funny, too: having a secret like your mum encased in cement in the basement. Maybe that was just me."

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Detail from the cover of "The City & the City."

China Mieville

"The City & the City," 2009. Mieville is arguably his generation's foremost fantasy/sci-fi novelist. He also has proven himself a master of the procedural mystery thanks to the inventive, mind-expanding "The City & the City," in which sisters cities exist in the same physical space, their boundaries dependent on residents "unseeing" the denizens of the other burgh. Wrote The Guardian: "The book is a fine, page-turning murder investigation in the tradition of Philip K Dick, gradually opening up to become something bigger and more significant than we originally suspected."

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A.A. Milne

"The Red House Mystery," 1922. Winnie-the-Pooh's creator wrote a mystery novel? Indeed he did, and it features "secret passages, uninvited guests, a sinister valet and a puzzling murder." The cozy mystery is clearly inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, though it offers more whimsy.

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Patterson in 2003. (AP)

James Patterson

"The Thomas Berryman Number," 1976. Forty-two years ago, before he became the biggest brand name in genre fiction, Patterson was an unknown ad man with literary aspirations. His first publishing effort was this clever political-assassination novel, which Kirkus Reviews called "a neat first number by a promising new author." The New York Times thought Patterson delved too much into minutiae, but it heralded the work overall. "Mr. Patterson's contributions to the genre," the paper wrote, "are his investigative-reporter sleuth, a sharp eye for interesting surfaces and an intriguing, gimmicky double double-cross."

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Thomas Pynchon

"Vineland," 1990. Pynchon's long-awaited follow-up to his epic 1973 novel "Gravity's Rainbow" received "approving but subtly disappointed reviews," with one critic insisting that it must be "a breather between biggies." "Vineland" deserved better from reviewers. This story of a counterculture government informer certainly isn't a mystery in the strict definition of the genre, but every Pynchon novel is a mystery -- weird and fantastical and defying easy categorization or explanation. "'Vineland' spooked me like the best landscapes of Conrad and Dickens," The Guardian's Andy Becket wrote in 2010. "I soon forgot precisely how the book ended but its atmospheres stayed with me."

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Detail from the cover of "Rose."

Martin Cruz Smith

"Rose," 1996. Cruz is known for his best-selling Arkady Renko novels, but he's also produced stand-alone mysteries that deserve more attention. Perhaps the best of these efforts is "Rose," which follows a former colonial explorer's investigation into the disappearance of a curate in 19th-century rural Britain. Wrote Publishers Weekly: "Smith's extravagant talent runs the spectrum here from sparkling dialogue and tantalizing mystery to grim, graphic depictions of mining life that sear both the conscience and the imagination."

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Detail from the cover of "Thieves Fall Out." (Amazon)

Gore Vidal

"Thieves Fall Out," 1953. The "Myra Breckinridge" author wrote pulp fiction under various pseudonyms in the early 1950s. "Thieves Fall Out" is the only one he refused to subsequently publish under his own name. The Egypt-set novel involves a dissolute American anti-hero and the heist of a "cursed" necklace. It also involves, wrote The New York Times, "scorpions, mobs, anonymous Arab ruffians and bad hotels." Point being: this is not great literature. But, offered Jonathan Sturgeon for Flavorwire: "[H]onestly: I found pleasure in watching this novel flail about angrily, like a drunken American in the scorching Cairene sun."

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Detail from the cover of "World Enough and Time."

Robert Penn Warren

"World Enough and Time," 1950. This genre-bending novel, the first by Warren after his Pulitzer Prize-winning "All the King's Men," burrows into the mystery that is Jeremiah Beaumont, a 19th-century Kentucky frontiersman facing trial for murder. Does he deserve to be convicted? Does he deserve to be loved or remembered? "An unusual and difficult book," wrote Kirkus Reviews, "oddly dated in style and substance, but an authentic mirroring of the moods and passions of the times."

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The Oregonian

-- Douglas Perry

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