Exhibition: SF in crime fiction.

The exhibition "Bullets across the Bay: The San Francisco Bay Area in Crime Fiction" at UC Berkeley's Doe Library is on display until February 29, 2012, including authors such as Anthony Boucher, Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, and Julie Smith. Article about the exhibition here.

Clues 29.1 issued: Christie, Spencer-Fleming, Borges, Temple, et al.

Volume 29, no. 1 (2011) of Clues: A Journal of Detection has been published, with a slew of interesting articles. Links on the author names below are to the article abstracts:

• Maria Hebert-Leiter on detecting crime after Hurricane Katrina (including analysis of James Lee Burke and several stories from New Orleans Noir, ed. Julie Smith)

• Stephen Knight on the work of Australian author Peter Temple

• Linda S. Maier on similarities between Jorge Luis Borges (who wrote detective fiction under pseudonyms) and Wilkie Collins

• Pamela S. Saur on the novels of Austrian author Gerhard Roth that can be read as murder mysteries

• Rachel Schaffer on sources of moral authority in Julia Spencer-Fleming's series

• Sarah E. Whitney on emotional violence in the neglected novels of Mary Westmacott (aka Agatha Christie)

Holmes and Watson on
the trail with the
"staunch hound" Pompey.
Illustration by Sidney
Paget, "The Adventure
of the Missing Three-
Quarter"

• Kate Watson on nineteenth-century dog detectives (see illustration at left), particularly those created by Australia's Mary Fortune

• Janice Shaw on Frank Moorhouse's use of whodunit techniques in Lateshows

• Elyssa Warkentin on women in two early fictionalizations of the Jack the Ripper murders

• Reviews of Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World, and Investigating Identities: Questions of Identity in Contemporary International Crime Fiction

Particularly fascinating is Emanuela Gutkowski's explanation using linguistic theory of just how Christie fools the reader regarding the murderer's identity in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). Readers should not be daunted by the word theory; the author clearly explains each point and illustrates it with examples from Christie's book.

Julie Smith on NPR's Morning Edition.

Nice piece on Julie Smith, Skip Langdon, and New Orleans on today's Morning Edition, as NPR continues its "Crime in the City" series.