Tag: fiction
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4th of July: Murder Ballads and Gretchen Peters’s “Independence Day”
Katy Horan’s gorgeously illustrated and chilling little book compiles twenty traditional murder ballads, some of them well known and others less familiar (at least to me), with insightful analysis of the genre. She Wore Black, a fun podcast about things gothic, horror, and mystery, has an interview with her that’s worth a listen. Horan talks…
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Back in Print: Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon
My Canada Day treat is this delight: the first volume in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series, her first set of novels. Report for Murder, first published in 1987, was McDermid’s début; she was a newspaper journalist when she created the UK’s first lesbian detective, an amateur investigator who is also a reporter when the series…
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The Stratemeyer Syndicate: Comparing the 1930 and 1959 Editions of Nancy Drew #1: The Secret of the Old Clock
Many readers who have long since forgotten plots and even titles can still conjure up the distinctive branded covers of the most famous Stratemeyer Syndicate series: pale lavender for the Bobbsey Twins, a deep vivid blue for the Hardy Boys, and bright yellow for Nancy Drew. None of these, however, are the original 1920s to…
