Author: Heidi Tiedemann Darroch
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Ariadne Oliver and Harriet Vane on the Work of Writing
I’ve come around to appreciating Agatha Christie’s fictional crime novelist, Ariadne Oliver. She’s written broadly, as a caricature of Christie herself–a substantial woman in midlife, trailing apple cores. Like Dorothy L. Sayers’s Harriet Vane, a writer of detective novels, Ariadne is a well-regarded author of mysteries who can’t resist dabbling in a few herself. Also…
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Uzma Jalaluddin’s Detective Aunty
Here’s something new and different, and very welcome: a murder mystery (cozy-ish) set in a multicultural Scarborough neighbourhood with a widowed Indo-Canadian woman in her late 50s as the plucky heroine. Uzma Jalaluddin is a Canadian author and journalist who has written acclaimed fiction and one play; this is her first murder mystery. Kausar Khan’s…
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Nancy Taber’s A Sea of Spectres
I tend to steer clear of paranormal mysteries. There’s a whole sub-genre of crime fiction that involves ghosts, psychic phenomena, astrology, or witches. And I love a good ghost story. Rebecca thrills me, and Vertigo is brilliant. But in these instances, the gothic shadings turn out to have very concrete origins. Not so in paranormal…
