The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: mystery

  • Nancy Taber’s A Sea of Spectres

    I tend to steer clear of paranormal mysteries. There’s a whole sub-genre of crime fiction that involves ghosts, psychic phenomena, astrology, or witches. And I love a good ghost story. Rebecca thrills me, and Vertigo is brilliant. But in these instances, the gothic shadings turn out to have very concrete origins. Not so in paranormal…

  • Margaret Millar

    Not travelling to the U.S. is impeding my research only when it comes to one author, the Canadian-American Margaret Millar (1915-1994), who was very famous in her day. In an astute 1971 New York Times review of Daphne du Maurier’s new novel, Millar points out that du Maurier’s books work better when they’re written in…

  • The Murders in Great Diddling: Katarina Bivald Revises and Parodies the Cozy

    The Edgar nominations were announced last month, and Katarina Bivald’s The Murders in Great Diddling is up for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award for best new cozy mystery. In the cozy, as the name suggests, the violence is off-stage and not off-putting. The victim may be widely disliked as in Bivald’s book, or the crime…