Author: Heidi Tiedemann Darroch
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Louise Penny: Cooking the Books
It’s been eighteen months of lots of teaching and creative writing, so the book project has ticked along much more slowly. But it’s also Christmas, and a perfect time to write about Louise Penny’s Three Pines Cookbook–available free online–The Nature of the Feast. While the title alludes to one of Penny’s most violent and disturbing…
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Literary Mysteries
Canadian women writers have incorporated mysteries–historical and contemporary–into their fiction in a variety of ways. Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, based on a nineteenth-century Ontario murder, and adapted to television by Sarah Polley, is a prominent example. Carol Shields’s novel Swann had a subtitle–A Mystery–added without her knowledge. And given that the book subsequently won a…
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Louise Penny and the Landscape of Canadian Women’s Crime Fiction
I’ve been working on a book project (tentative title above) on Canadian women’s mystery and detective fiction. Some of the authors I’m covering, like Penny, Gail Bowen, and Ausma Khan, are well-known to a wide range of readers; others may be less familiar. Here are a few of my research questions: How does place–including locale,…
