Rosemary Herbert – författare

Perfect for anyone who harbours a love of the sea or simply of mystery stories, this is an intriguing new selection of tales in which crimes and their solutions occur in shipboard or shoreline environments. Luminaries past and present are represented, with selections spanning a wide range of moods: from the humorous work of Catherine Aird to a psychologically chilling piece by Susan Moody. Stories feature well-loved characters in a variety of waterside settings: John Mortimer's Rumpole and She Who Must be Obeyed, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, and Edward D. Hoch's Nick Velvet all find their vacation cruises interrupted by crimes requiring their services. The book also features translations of works by such famed international authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Saho Sasazawa, and, for the first time ever in English, Chris Rippen of the Netherlands. Each story is introduced by a brief essay noting the hallmarks of the author's work, and providing the reader with an enticing comment about each highly original use of the waterside setting.

"Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend."--Agatha Christie Perhaps that is why audiences continue to be captivated by what Raymond Chandler called "The Simple Art of Murder." For who populates the pages of crime and mystery writing? People, sometimes in ordinary situations, sometimes in extraordinary ones, but in every respect, human. These are the characters we willingly follow into the mystery genre's uneasy imaginative territory. What is it about their strengths and flaws that makes us join them? Is it possible that we see a bit of ourselves in them--or in the sleuth tracking them? And who created those characters in the first place? What life experience and expertise informs their work? What are the sources of their themes, regional accents, and even the axes that some grind? Why do some wish to give us a good laugh, while others seem hell-bent on making us shudder? Whodunit? A Who's Who in Crime & Mystery Writing answers these questions and more. Here mystery expert Rosemary Herbert brings together enlightening and entertaining information on hundreds of classic and contemporary characters and authors. Some--such as P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Sherlock Holmes and Kinsey Millhone appear in individual entries. Still more keep company in articles about characters we admire, such as the Clerical Sleuth, and in pieces about those we love to hate, including the Femme Fatale and Con Artist. There is even an article on a figure that haunts so many great works of mystery --The Corpse. Drawing on the Edgar Award-nominated volume The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, Herbert has added 101 new entries on the hottest new names in works ranging from puzzling whodunits to chilling crime novels.

This new collection will pick up where Dorothy L. Sayers' The Omnibus of Crime (1929) left off - "in the heart of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction" - bringing together monumental, entertaining works of mystery short fiction from the early 1930s to the present, from the inter-war years of the twentieth century to first years of the twenty-first century. Herbert will introduce each story, placing the selection in the context of the author and the genre's literary history. Emphasis will be placed upon representing the most exciting styles and voices in the genre rather than a slavish servitude to a decade-by-decade approach. Stories on the short list include Norman Mailer "The Killer", P.D. James "Great Aunt Allie's Fly Papers" or "The Victim", Sue Grafton "The Parker Shotgun", Frankie Y. Bailey "Since You Went Away", John Cheever "Montraldo", Paul Theroux "The Johore Murders", Tony Hillerman "First Lead Gasser", David Winser "The Boat Race Murder", James M. Cain "Cigarette Girl", Dorothy L. Sayers "The Necklace of Pearls", Linda Barnes "Lucky Penny", Cornell Woolrich "Death at the Burlesque", Raymond Chandler "Red Wind", Dennis Lehane "Running Out of Dog", and James Crumley "Hot Springs".

This fantastic new collection picks up where Dorothy L. Sayers left off, bringing together monumental, important,and entertaining works of short crime fiction published over eight decades from the era of the Great Depression to the first uears of the twenty-first century. In lively introductory essays, celebrated crime writer Tony Hillerman and critic Rosemary Herbert place each story in the context of the author's work and the genre's literary history. Their extraordinary collection is international in scope and emphasizes the most exciting styles and voices, rather than taking a typical decade-by-decade approach. As a result A New Omnibus of Crime is packed with page-turning, engaging, and spine-tingling selections. Stories include Patricia Highsmith's "Woodrow Wilson's Necktie," Sue Grafton's "A Poison That Leaves No Trace," and many more, including never-before-published works from Jefferey Deaver, Catherine Aird, and Alexander McCall Smith.

This companion is a one-volume, alphabetically arranged encyclopedia exploring the full range of literature suggested by the title. The 672 articles range from brief factual pieces to longer synthetic treatments of topics of central thematic interest.

In 34 stories, this anthology explores the historical development of American detective fiction over a span of 150 years - from Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s to Marcia Muller in the 1990s. The selections represent variety in chronological period, narrative voice, geography, and milieu; and are chosen for their sheer entertainment value. Classics are included, as well as selections that will surprise even well-read detective fans. Authors include Anna Katharine Green, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Sue Grafton and William Faulkner.

Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe's basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. As early as 1917, Susan Glaspell evinced a poignant understanding of motive in a murder in an isolated farmhouse. And with World War I, the Roaring '20s, the rise of organized crime and corrupt police with Prohibition, and the Great Depression, American detective fiction branched out in all directions, led by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who brought crime out of the drawing room and into the "mean streets" where it actually occurred.In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty-three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America's unique contribution to this highly popular genre. Tracing its progress from elegant "locked room" mysteries, to the hard-boiled realism of the '30s and '40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman himself. There are also many delightful surprises: Bret Harte, for instance, offers a Sherlockian pastiche with a hero named Hemlock Jones, and William Faulkner blends local color, authentic dialogue, and dark, twisted pride in "An Error in Chemistry." We meet a wide range of sleuths, from armchair detective Nero Wolfe, to Richard Sale's journalist Daffy Dill, to Robert Leslie Bellem's wise-cracking Hollywood detective Dan Turner, to Linda Barnes's six-foot tall, red-haired, taxi-driving female P.I., Carlotta Carlyle.And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard-edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Perhaps most important, the book offers a brilliant summation of America's signal contribution to crime fiction, highlighting the myriad ways in which we have reshaped this genre. The editors show how Raymond Chandler used crime, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a spotlight with which he could illuminate the human condition; how Ed McBain, in "A Small Homicide," reveals a keen knowledge of police work as well as of the human sorrow which so often motivates crime; and how Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer solved crime not through blood stains and footprints, but through psychological insight into the damaged lives of the victim's family. And throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life-long interest--not to say love--of this quintessentially American genre. American crime fiction is as varied and as democratic as America itself.Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.