Category: Gail Bowen
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Gail Bowen’s The Solitary Friend
In The Solitary Friend (ECW Press), Gail Bowen revisits themes and characters that have peppered her mystery series over more than three decades.
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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…
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Gail Bowen’s The Last Good Day and Agatha Christie’s Dead Man’s Folly
I’ve just come across a fun allusion. Insomnia has me on a pre-bedtime reading diet of innocuous mystery fiction, ancient Greek novels, and Greek vocabulary. The latter, in particular, is very handy. Working on contract verbs produces slumber surprisingly quickly, but then I wake up, over and over. This is an Addison’s Disease/steroids issue, temporarily…
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Three Pines: Adapting Louise Penny’s Gamache Novels
Adaptations of Canadian mystery fiction are sometimes ephemeral or short-lived. I’ve been unable to track down copies of the series of TV films based on Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn novels, although it sounds like there were significant changes. For instance, IMDB describes the character in The Wandering Soul Murders–one of Bowen’s grimmest novels, featuring a…
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Gail Bowen’s Regina, Saskatchewan
The maven of Canadian prairie mystery fiction, retired English professor Gail Bowen has published nearly twenty novels in her Joanne Kilbourn series. When the series opens, with Deadly Appearances, Joanne is a recently widowed mother of three with years of experience in left-wing Saskatchewan politics. Her late husband was killed in an apparently random attack,…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 