The latest addition to the crowded how-to-write-a-mystery field is enjoyable in the way any discussion of the craft and business by a witty and accomplished pro would be. It’s humorously, chattily written with some good common-sense advice, and the parodic fictional examples that begin and end the chapters are often very funny. But there are many better technical manuals available. The history and classification of the early chapters are so weak that some readers may bail out before they get to the more useful material. Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case was not the first detective novel, though an argument could be made if it had actually been published in 1848 as Kurland states, and the definition of a cozy—few of whose contemporary practitioners are anything like Agatha Christie—is misleading and oversimplified.
The fourth and final volume of the author’s monumental reference on 20th-century stage crime begins chronologically with the 1975 John Kander/Fred Ebb/Bob Fosse musical Chicago and ends with Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project (2000). Discussed along the way are modern classics (David Mamet’s American Buffalo, Sam Shepard’s Buried Child), adaptations of print novels (three versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles, two of Dracula, A Murder Is Announced, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, The Little Sister, The Talented Mr. Ripley, To Kill a Mockingbird, Jane Eyre), and numerous offbeat or obscure oddities that have managed to get an English-language production. Represented are renowned mainstream playwrights (David Rabe, Terence Ratigan, Tom Stoppard, David Henry Huang, Romulus Linney, Tennessee Williams), and others best known for mystery fiction (James Yaffe, Simon Brett, Francis Durbridge, Ira Levin, David Stuart Davies). Entries provide exhaustive descriptions and plot summaries, stage histories, notes on the playwrights and authors of source material, and quotes from reviews. Appendices on poison, the courtroom, death row, children in peril, and one-acts update information from the previous volumes. This is one of the key secondary sources of the young century, and I hope some awards-giving body will recognize it.
The McFarland Companion series, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell, has been consistently excellent, both in its choice of subjects and its quality of scholarship and writing. This latest addition is well up to the standard set by earlier volumes on John Buchan, E.X. Ferrars, and Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, and contains the usual features: a biography of the subject, a life chronology, and alphabetical and chronological lists of works, followed by a main text in dictionary form including works, major characters, locales, associates and influences, and topical essays (e.g., “Female Detectives and Marriage”).
Though usually associated with a single famous title, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) produced a huge body of work between 1860 and the year of her death. Beller makes a strong case for her historical importance to the development of detective fiction and the changing status of women. Many readers (including this one) will be set on the trail of her less well-known novels, readily available on the print and ebook markets.
The McFarland Companion series, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell, has been consistently excellent, both in its choice of subjects and its quality of scholarship and writing. This latest addition is well up to the standard set by earlier volumes on John Buchan, E.X. Ferrars, and Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, and contains the usual features: a biography of the subject, a life chronology, and alphabetical and chronological lists of works, followed by a main text in dictionary form including works, major characters, locales, associates and influences, and topical essays (e.g., “Mafia and Representation of the Church”).
Born in 1925, the prolific Andrea Camilleri, creator of Sicilian cop Salvo Montalbano, is my personal favorite among recent European mystery writers in translation. He is the first non-English-language writer as well as the first living subject to be covered in the McFarland series. Rinaldi lists the Montalbano books and stories and the author’s other writings by their original Italian titles in separate alphabetical and chronological lists, with US titles or translations of titles not published in English given in parentheses.
Conan Doyle’s previously unpublished log of his 1880 voyage as 20-year-old ship’s surgeon on the Arctic whaler S.S. Hope is presented in 200 pages of facsimile, including some skillful drawings by the multitalented author, and an 80-page transcript extensively annotated by the editors, who also offer an excellent introduction and concluding essay.
Doyle was an engaging writer from the beginning, and this superbly designed book has obvious biographical and historical interest. Appended are four of Doyle’s later writings drawing on his Arctic experience, two nonfiction magazine accounts, the ghost story “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” and the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of Black Peter.”
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