Marilyn's Mystery Reads

How fast the summer flies by!  It’s almost time for school again, at least at Brandeis University where I teach courses on mysteries in the BOLLI program.  My class, which starts on September 14th, will discuss SISTERS IN CRIME, women authors writing about female protagonists.

Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle are credited as being the “fathers” of the mystery novel.  But what about the “mothers”?  Do any of these names sound familiar–Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, Catherine Louise Perkis, Mary Elizabeth Braddon?  They are women who wrote mysteries in the second half of the nineteenth century but who are virtually unknown today.

In SISTERS IN CRIME, we will read novels by the women who followed these early pioneers.  How are the books of today’s female authors different from books written by male authors?  Do women have a unique perspective that comes across to readers?  We’ll start by reading Agatha Christie’s murder mystery that introduces Miss Jane Marple, an unmarried Englishwoman in a small village in 1930, and end with Deanna Raybourne’s novel featuring four British assassins who find themselves out of work.  What has happened to female protagonists in the nearly 100 years since the first Miss Marple mystery?

To give you a sense of the differences between the women, their professions, and their locations, here is our reading list:  The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie, as mentioned above, takes place in a small English village featuring an unmarried woman; J is for Judgment by Sue Grafton takes readers “across the pond” to read about a twice married and divorced private investigator; A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller, in which the heroine is the district attorney in a small West Virginia county; The Last Place You Look by Kristin Lepionka features a world-weary private investigator with family problems; Echo by Tracy Clark, in which a Chicago police detective must put aside her private issues to solve a murder case; The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves finds us once again in the British Isles with a tough police detective; Last Seen in Havana by Teresa Dovalpage takes us across the ocean once again in search of the truth about the death of a woman’s mother; and Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourne, in which four female assassins are very reluctantly facing the end of their careers.

I hope you will join me and the members of my SISTERS IN CRIME class and read along with us.

Marilyn

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