The sorely missed Charlotte MacLeod, creator of the Sarah Kelling-Max Bittersohn series and the Peter Shandy series under her own name and books under the pseudonym Alisa Craig featuring mountie Madoc Rhys and the Grub-and-Stakers gardening sleuths, was born today in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1922. She died in 2005.The Kelling-Bittersohn novels have a certain screwball quality to them, such as in The Family Vault (1979) when the extremely WASPy Sarah and Max find it necessary to go undercover(?) in Chinese costume. A favorite of the Christmas season is Rest You Merry (1978), where Professor Shandy finds himself embroiled in a heated competition involving tacky house holiday decorations and a dead body. The Craig books abound in eccentrics.
MacLeod, a founder of the American Crime Writers League and an Edgar nominee for The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (1987) and We Dare Not Go A-Hunting (1980), also wrote a biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart, Had She But Known (1994).
