Dinner with Dick Francis Davis, J. Madison
World Literature Today,
09/2016, Letnik:
90, Številka:
5
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
Francis's books were all set in the world of horse racing, but he did not use the same detective character over and over as is most common in mystery publishing. The horse, Devon Loch, was hugely ...talented and popular, but, for reasons that sportsmen argued about for years and could never settle, Devon Loch rounded the turn far in the lead and, as it thundered toward the finish line, abruptly spread its legs and stopped. ...their work, however it was done, created the books, and that is all that matters.
...in 1988, Gar Anthony Haywood, one of the finest contemporary detective writers, managed with Fear of the Dark to poke a hole in the wall of the black detective's "ghetto," creating the entrance ...that allowed Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress to become a best-seller and a modern classic. The hardboiled detective novel, along with the police procedural, has always promised a more direct expression of the harsher realities, and though the preponderance of pulp jockeys merely exploited the sordid for shock value, a masterly writer like Mosley can adapt the tradition to his own significant purposes. Since 1955, when the Grand Master award was first given to Agatha Christie, no African American has received it.
While Christie sometimes switched her detectives, using Poirot or Miss Marple or Tommy and Tuppence; Allingham wrote several novels without her upper-class detective Campion; and Sayers ultimately ...gave up crime writing as an inferior form of literature, Marsh was steady from her first novel until her death in using her detective Roderick Alleyn in all her books. Each of the council members is associated with a sign of the zodiac, for example, and other characters are associated with heavenly bodies. Besides taking a nineteenth-century form, the novel simulates the language of the time.
Bring out the Bodies Davis, J. Madison
World literature today,
09/2015, Letnik:
89, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Novels are obviously not the same as television shows and must be written differently, but to preserve the particular, popular flavor of Law and Order in the novel, I was asked to check in with an ...executive producer and writer of many episodes, William N. Fordes. The purpose of having to seek out the identity of the victim was not to kill time but provided an opportunity for the kinds of reversals Law and Order specialized in.\n Many writers and critics assert that murder is the only crime worthy of a mystery writer's attention, despite the fact there are many excellent caper novels and occasional espionage stories without a murder.
