Recently I decided to re-read the unfortunately short list of Dorothy Sayers' fine Lord Peter murder mysteries, just for the pure pleasure of it. Some I recall quite well, others I've more or less forgotten. Join me, won't you, even if you saw the tv versions? Here's the list of titles, in chronological order.
My father recommended "Woman in White," by Wilkie Collins as something I should get "under my belt" when I was in high school. My father was always stuffing books under there; it's a wonder I wasn't bogged down. Most of his suggestions I rather enjoyed and was glad to have read, but this one I never undertook. Perhaps because it was so long, although "long" never really bothered me--I liked long Victorian novels that took me into their world, that I missed when I came to the end. But to be truthful, I enjoyed Collins' "Moonstone" more than the "Woman in White,"
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Jonathan Lopez’s The Man Who Made Vermeers retells the story of Han Van Meegeren, the masterful Dutch art forger of the mid-Twentieth Century, the man who became a sort of folk hero to his countrymen after World War II when he confessed to having sold one of his fakes to Hermann Goering. Although there’s nothing really that mysterious about this read, Lopez’s book was selected in 2009 as one of five finalists for the Edgar (Allen Poe) Award for non-fiction crime writing, so I guess it's a legit topic here. I recently re-read Dashiell Hammett’s noir thriller, Red Harvest, published in 1929. I wanted to go back to the beginning, get a grip on the type of book literary agents and publishers are saying the market currently favors. I was thinking I might even incorporate a few dark elements into my own mystery. But, although I enjoyed re-reading Hammett--he is after all from my town--in the end, I don't believe I'm cut out for noir (though noir goes well with my hair, I'm told). Anyway, as you might recall, Red Harvest describes the bloody clean-up of corruption in Personville, Montana
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AuthorA reader, a writer, a poet, and sometime philosopher; an urbanist, a planner, an earth advocate, a peaceable person; a mother, a grandmother, a weeder of gardens, a baker of pies. Archives
August 2014
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