Category: academic mystery fiction
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On Learning Greek: From Classical Mysteries to Alice Munro’s “Silence”
This will be my fourth and, for now, final foray into the academic mystery novel, and here I will be considering Donna Tartt’s unexpected blockbuster The Secret History; an odd curiosity found in a second-hand book store, Carol Clemeau’s The Ariadne Clue; the recent fiction of Alex Michaelides, including The Maidens; and to end on…
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Adjuncts and Murder Mysteries
This was intended to be the third of three posts about academic mystery fiction, but a social media comment from Janice MacDonald made me pause. She noted that her Randy Craig series, set in Edmonton, is an instance of a Canadian academic who investigates murder within an English department. I’d been suggesting that, unlike in…
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Murderous English Departments
I’m stealing someone else’s observation today. Pretty sure this is from Gail Bowen’s Sleuth, her guide to writing mysteries, but I can’t check right this moment: No one who teaches in an English department has ever considered murdering a colleague in order to ascend to the august office of English Department Chair. It must be…
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A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Academic Mysteries: Why Do English Departments Dominate?
Have you read A.S. Byatt’s Possession? It’s a brilliant book, although I find the most highly praised portions–the author’s careful recreation of Victorian poetry in two voices–far less engaging than the academic caper and intrigue. It’s extraordinary that Byatt can create poetry, in quasi-Browning/Tennyson and Rossetti/Barrett Browning styles, so effectively. But there is already more…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 