Miss Marple
The Sleuthing Spinster: Why Single Women Rule Cozy Fiction
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When people talk about great fictional detectives, there are classic names that come to mind: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot; Sam Spade; Phillip Marlowe; and Columbo trip easily off the tongue. In the modern era there’s even Batman, whose cool gadgets are second only to his skill as a deductive genius (he did debut in Detective…
An Appreciation of Gardening Detectives
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Gardening detectives, both professional and amateur, abound in crime fiction and they appeared early on. Wilkie Collins introduced the first horticulturally inclined investigator in The Moonstone. The serialized story first appeared in the United Kingdom in January 1868 in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round and simultaneously in Harper’s Weekly in the United States….
A Lovely Place to Die: Favorite Settings for a Charming Murder
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A twitching curtain conceals a pair of prying eyes. A friendly smile belies a litany of terrible sins. And eventually, someone is going to find a dead body on their well-manicured lawn. The small town is a mainstay of cozy mysteries, and for good reason. Readers flock to the genre precisely because of the juxtaposition…