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Literature Criticism
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Donald Goines is the foremost example of a cultural phenomenon possible no earlier than the 1970s—a successful black author of mass-market crime fiction who wrote about blacks and primarily for a black readership. All of...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Erle Stanley Gardner spent much of his childhood traveling with his mining-engineer father through the remote regions of California, Oregon, and the Klondike. In his teens he not only boxed for money but promoted a...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)William F. Buckley, Jr., a leading conservative spokesman and editor of the National Review, is also the author of best-selling spy novels. His hero is Blackford ("Blacky") Oakes, who, like Buckley himself at one time in...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)In the last 40 years of his life John D. MacDonald wrote 78 books and over 600 short stories. Of his 69 novels, all but 20 were published as paperback originals, including the first fourteen Travis McGee novels. The...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Like Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes was nearly 50 when he began to write detective novels. But the careers of these two leading American writers of crime fiction were quite different: Chandler, with his English...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)During a career that has spanned almost 60 years, Eric Ambler has established himself as a giant among thriller writers. His reputation as one of the most innovative, original, and influential thriller writers of the...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Both science fiction and detective fiction by Isaac Asimov unite in revealing in the author a fondness for the fact, a delight in reasoning from careful observation, and an absorption in cause and effect. Several...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Julian Symons published his first detective novel, The Immaterial Murder Case, in 1945, and its appearance marked, if it did not actually cause, an important turning point in his career as a writer. During the 1930s...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Since 1985, Jonathan Kellerman has created, in the 10 Alex Delaware novels, one of the most successful detective series of recent times. Like his creator, Alex is a clinical psychologist who specializes in children's...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Georges Simenon, one of the true giants of the novel, earned through the fecundity of his imagination and his devotion to his craft the right to be termed a genius. Apparently equally indifferent to critical scorn or...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)The telos of justice, both canceled and negatively fulfilled, accounts for the chilly power of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which made John le Carré the premier Cold War novelist. In The Little Drummer Girl, which...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Lilian Jackson Braun has written a well-crafted, witty, and highly entertaining series called The Cat Who.... These books tell the adventures of amateur detective Jim Qwilleran and his two Siamese cats, Koko and Yum Yum....
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Evan Hunter has written an imposing body of popular fiction under his own name, but mystery fans know him best as Ed McBain, the author of the 87th Precinct stories, which is the longest, the most varied, and by all odds...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)Colin Wilson is so much more than a writer of "mysteries" that his inclusion here might be equivocal if mystery writers had not recently become intellectually respectable. Wilson's first book, The Outsider, appeared in...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)There are four words that come immediately to mind when the name of Lawrence Block is mentioned to anyone familiar at all with the field of crime fiction: longevity, prolificity, versatility, and excellence. He has been...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)G. K. Chesterton, very much a figure of the first third of the 20th century, was a spouting volcano of fire-dazzling words who appears to have left solely mounds of dead ashes—with one notable exception, his still...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)As we all know, Dashiell Hammett, according to Raymond Chandler, took Murder out of the Venetian Vase and put it in the alley. If he had lived to see it, Chandler no doubt would have said of Tony Hillerman that he took...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)For decades Phyllis A. Whitney has reigned as the best-known American writer of romantic suspense, a field that has otherwise been dominated by British authors such as Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, and Dorothy Eden....
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)The private lives of many authors may seem perfectly serene and uneventful, but time and again this sort of existence has proven to be no hindrance in the pursuit of a literary destiny. The career of Loren D. Estleman is...
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From:St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (4th ed.)No matter what genre Richard Condon chooses for his canvas, he brings to all his work a love for the complexities and dark crannies of motive and circumstance; even his minor characters have something to conceal. A man...