The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: mystery

  • 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…

  • Southern-Fried Crime Fiction: Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott Novels

    Southern-Fried Crime Fiction: Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott Novels

    I won’t start eating biscuits and gravy or grits for breakfast every day, but this was a nice change on a very rainy late-March morning. One of my mother’s favourite songs to sing us was “Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’, shortnin’”, a ditty which I’ve only recently realized was deeply problematic. The version I learned…