Bye-bye, Spenser, good-bye

When writer Robert B. Parker died in January of 2010, I was still a couple of weeks from launching this blog. Otherwise, I’d have been one of the many remembering Parker, who created tough-but-tender Boston P.I. Spenser in 1971′sThe Godwulf Manuscript. It was the beginning of a long-running series that revived detective fiction, linking the [...]

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Happy birthday, Holmes

January 6 has long been considered the birthday of the great detective Sherlock Holmes by members of the Baker Street Irregulars, the foremost society of Holmes’ scholars and enthusiasts. That Holmes is the fictional creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle matters not. As T.S. Eliot wrote in a 1929 review of  The Complete Sherlock Holmes [...]

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Moon over Beantown

A child went missing, people died, and hearts were broken in Dennis Lehane’s haunting 1998 novel, Gone, Baby, Gone.  Readers familiar with the book and/or the fine movie adaptation know that detective Patrick Kenzie’s wrenching decision to return 4-year-old Amanda McCready to her neglectful mother wasn’t cause for celebration. It split his professional and romantic partnership with Angie Gennaro, although the two [...]

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And then there was Agatha

During my recent malaise, I happened on Joan Acocella’s excellent story in the August 16th edition of The New Yorker, “Queen of Crime,” about how Agatha Christie created the modern murder mystery. It reminded me how I went straight from Nancy Drew and The Dana Girls to Christie’s whodunits and never looked back. She ushered [...]

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