Word: crimeeds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...truth is more unlikely than the tales. To beguile his off-hours, a young British physician invents a new kind of detective, a "thinking machine" who reconstructs a crime from minutiae much as a paleontologist builds a dinosaur from fossilized toes. The sleuth is accompanied by a general practitioner who respectfully annotates each case. Almost overnight the pair rise from obscurity to international renown. In an attempt to get on with "serious" works about history and spiritualism, the author decides to murder his invention by dropping him from a precipice. But the detective refuses to die. By public demand...
...time when fame has the durability of a rock song and when real crime catches the eye and the heart, these eminent Victorians should be as obsolete as the hansom cab. Instead, they keep rising in stature and value. In this, the centenary year of their debut in Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887, Holmes and Watson will receive some 5,000 letters at 221B Baker Street, even though the place now houses the Abbey National Building Society. Groups on four continents regularly meet to study the canon (56 stories and four novels), as well as some 12,000 books...
...between a writer's literary aspirations and the coarser demands of the marketplace besets only the "serious" author. Novelists who turn out the mystery, thriller, police or spy story are presumed to have long since made their peace with the printer's devil. In fact, however, the ranks of crime writers are as beleaguered as any other by the need for compromise. The battle rarely focuses on setting, which may be urban or rural, domestic or foreign, modern or ancient, or on subject matter, for which these days the rule seems to be the kinkier the better. The clash comes...
...whatever means, the vast majority of crime writers reconcile themselves to return engagements. Thus despite the dangers, or at least doldrums, of repetition, series account for most of the current crop of top crime fiction. Perhaps the most impressive cumulative performance comes from Sir John Appleby, the fictional retired head of Scotland Yard and the signature detective of Michael Innes, a.k.a. J.I.M. Stewart, 80, a retired Oxford don who has been crafting wry, sprightly, often fanciful mysteries for more than half a century. The "ex-bobby," as he coyly calls himself, reappears in an umpteenth adventure, Appleby and the Ospreys...
Another remarkable record of consistency has been notched by Edith Pargeter, a prolific British writer and translator (of Czech poetry, among other pursuits). Under the nom de crime Ellis Peters she has produced The Rose Rent (Morrow; 190 pages; $15.95), her 13th highly evocative novel about Brother Cadfael, a 12th century monk in the abbey town of Shrewsbury. Like his 20th century soulmate, Father Brown of the G.K. Chesterton stories, Cadfael attractively suggests that the highest act of faith is the use of reason. Robert Barnard, whose mordantly funny one-off mysteries are as good as any currently being produced...