The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: mystery

  • Solving Plot Problems

    Most of my focus has been on revising a novel draft that I’ve despaired of, these past two years, since I completed my 75,000 or so words. [Worse than feared: 104,665, which is, for my chosen genre, a baggy monster of a book, and unpublishable as a first novel.] I could see the plot and…

  • Independent Women in Golden Age Mysteries: From Evil Under the Sun to Gaudy Night

    Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun (1941) has a wonderful series of final revelations. Poirot untangles the various threads that have complicated his investigation of Arlena Stuart’s mystery, for a rapt audience of suspects and bystanders. While the crime was rather convoluted in its execution, the motives were straightforward. Then there are the last several…

  • Golden Age Women Writers: Josephine Tey and Dorothy L. Sayers

    Josephine Tey is best known for The Daughter of Time, which remains highly regarded. A temporarily invalided Scotland Yard detective sets his wits to solving the poignant murders of the little princes in the tower, way back in . . . 1483. A very cold case. In The New Yorker, Sara Polsky’s “The Detective Novel…