Saturday, October 29, 2011

Thursday Thirteen #21


These are all books coming out in November (in hardcover). As far as I can remember, all but three of these authors are new to me: Madelyn Alt, Umberto Eco, and Diana Gabaldon. The rest are now on the ever growing list of authors to be read.

1) In Charm's Way by Madelyn Alt


2) Rock Bottom by Sarah Andrews


3) A Dark and Lonely Place by Edna Buchanan


4) The Ionian Sanction by Gary Corby


5) The Templar Magician by P.C. Doherty
6) The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
7) A Burial at Sea by Charles Finch
8) The Scottish Prisoner by Diana Gabaldon
9) Deed of Murder by Cora Harrison
10) The betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill
11) The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol
12) The Impossible Dead by ian Rankin
13) Praetorian by Simon Scarrow

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Thursday Thirteen #20 Mystery's History

If you've ever wondered about how the detective novel came to be so popular, this list should give you a good place to start.

1) The Book of Daniel and Oedipus Rex both have the main characters questioning witnesses to solve a mystery.
2) In The Three Apples, one of the tales in One Thousand and One Nights, the Caliph’s vizier was charged with finding the killer of a young woman found in a chest, and told to do so within three days or his life was forfeit.
3) Voltaire’s Zadig (1748) an early example of detective fiction.
4) Detective fiction in the English speaking world is considered to have begun with Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841).
5) Charles Dickens’ Bleak House has a mystery as one of its subplots.
6) Wilkie Collins (Charles Dickens’ protégé) is credited with both the “first great mystery novel”, The Lady in White (1860), but also the work considered by both T.S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers to be the best detective story written, The Moonstone (1868).
7) In 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the master detective, Sherlock Holmes.
8) The 1920s and 30s are considered the golden age of detective fiction, and included the works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayres, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham.
9) During this same period, Rex Stout and Ellery Queen were publishing in America.
10) In 1894, British author Arthur Morrison created the first modern private detective, Martin Hewitt.
11) American authors who produced novels about private eyes included Dashiell Hammett, Jonathan Lattimer, and Erle Stanley Gardner.
12) The late 1930s brought a new private eye, in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.
13) The late 1970s and 1980s brought women into the private eye novel with the works of Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton.

Some of this information was found on Wikipedia, some of it I had read or heard previously, and some can also be found on Stop Your Killing Me.

Friday, October 7, 2011

History's Mysteries - #2

On this list of history's mysteries, the author has used a writer from that particular time period as the protagonist of their mysteries.

Susan Wittig Albert
• Beatrix Potter: author and illustrator in the Lake District in 1900s England

Stephanie Barron
• Jane Austen: the famous author in England

Joanna Challis
• Daphne du Maurier: young aspiring author in 1920s Cornwall, England

Lillian De La Torre
• Dr. Sam. Johnson: the real-life 18th-century lexicographer and sage, in London, England

Mary Devlin
• Geoffrey Chaucer: poet and detective in the late 1300s, in England

Simon Hawke
• Will Shakespeare: young writer, and Tuck Smythe, an aspiring actor, the Elizabethan era’s answer to Holmes and Watson, in London, England

Peter J. Heck
• Mark Twain: 19th century American author, and Wentworth Cabot, his secretary, in the USA

Peter King
•Jack London: the author in the 1890s (before his famous novels) in San Francisco, California

Anna Maclean
• Louisa May Alcott: amateur sleuth before becoming a famous author, in pre-Civil War Boston, Massachusetts

William J. Palmer
• Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens: 19th century writers in London, England

Laura Joh Rowland
• Charlotte Brontë: the author, in mid-1880s England

Harold Schechter
• Edgar Allan Poe: in the 1830s-1840s, in Baltimore, Maryland, New York City, and Massachusetts

Nicola Upson
• Josephine Tey: the mystery writer in 1930s Britain

If you are interested in mysteries set in a certain era, or would like to see more mysteries with writers as the protagonist, check out Stop You're Killing Me.