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I love history and I love to laugh. That’s why I brand myself as a writer of Victorian Whodunits with a touch of humor. I’ve spent decades learning about 1800s America. I began sharing that knowledge by performing in costume as real women of history. But I couldn’t be on stage all the time so I began writing the books I want to read, books that entertain while sticking to the basic facts of history and giving the flavor of an earlier time. I seek that great marriage of words that brings readers to a new understanding. As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Steve Hockensmith is a hoot. I love this book. It features Sherlock Holmes wannabe Old Red and boyish galoot Big Red as the Huck Finn version of Watson. Steve’s books are raucously funny while offering a brand new perspective on the last decade of the 19th century.
Somewhere due west of Deadwood, a pair of unlikely cowboy sleuths investigate murder just like their hero, Sherlock Holmes. 1893 is a tough year in Montana, and any job is a good job. When Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer sign on as ranch hands at the secretive Bar- VR cattle spread, they're not expecting much more than hard work, bad pay, and a comfortable campfire around which they can enjoy their favourite pastime: scouring Harpers J,Veekly for stories about the famous Sherlock Holmes. When another ranch hand turns up in an outhouse with a bullet in his brain, Old…
I love history and I love to laugh. That’s why I brand myself as a writer of Victorian Whodunits with a touch of humor. I’ve spent decades learning about 1800s America. I began sharing that knowledge by performing in costume as real women of history. But I couldn’t be on stage all the time so I began writing the books I want to read, books that entertain while sticking to the basic facts of history and giving the flavor of an earlier time. I seek that great marriage of words that brings readers to a new understanding. As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Mark Twain is my writing idol. Before Roughing it, I’d never read a book
written during the Civil War era which didn’t take sides and grind axes.
From it, I learned detachment, that personal adventures can live
side-by-side with even the most earth-shattering events. And that
hilarious stories like “Bemis and the Buffalo” are the best antidote for
the chaos and pain of war.
The celebrated author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn mixes fact and fiction in a rousing travelogue that serves as “a portrait of the artist as a young adventurer.”*
In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a newcomer in the Wild West, working as a civil servant, silver prospector, mill worker, and finally a reporter and traveling lecturer. Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years traveling from Nevada to California to Hawaii, as Twain tried his luck at anything and everything—and usually failed. Twain’s encounters with tarantulas and donkeys, vigilantes…
I love history and I love to laugh. That’s why I brand myself as a writer of Victorian Whodunits with a touch of humor. I’ve spent decades learning about 1800s America. I began sharing that knowledge by performing in costume as real women of history. But I couldn’t be on stage all the time so I began writing the books I want to read, books that entertain while sticking to the basic facts of history and giving the flavor of an earlier time. I seek that great marriage of words that brings readers to a new understanding. As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Diane Day’s Fremont Jones is a heroine after my own heart. She remains plucky throughout the entire series, even though the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Of course, a plucky woman in the first decade of the 20th century was bound to run afoul of society and propriety. Fremont found herself in scrape after silly scrape. This is a mystery with lots of fun. But more than that, it offers a charming sense of life in the olden days during the times that tried women’s souls.
Awakening to find herself in the middle of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, Miss Fremont Jones struggles to escape the ensuing chaos while learning how to drive, avoiding ardent suitors, and investigating two murderous smugglers.
I love history and I love to laugh. That’s why I brand myself as a writer of Victorian Whodunits with a touch of humor. I’ve spent decades learning about 1800s America. I began sharing that knowledge by performing in costume as real women of history. But I couldn’t be on stage all the time so I began writing the books I want to read, books that entertain while sticking to the basic facts of history and giving the flavor of an earlier time. I seek that great marriage of words that brings readers to a new understanding. As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
This book is laugh-out-loud funny. The rich socialite heroine is quite
intelligent in some things and ridiculously stupid in others. The whole
book is absolutely unbelievable, but utterly delightful – and way beyond
society's terms of approval for women in 1907 Los Angeles. Sometimes a
book doesn’t have to be anything but a joy to read. This one delivers.
It's 1907 Los Angeles. Mischievous socialite Anna Blanc is the kind of young woman who devours purloined crime novels—but must disguise them behind covers of more domestically-appropriate reading. She could match wits with Sherlock Holmes, but in her world women are not allowed to hunt criminals.
Determined to break free of the era's rigid social roles, Anna buys off the chaperone assigned by her domineering father and, using an alias, takes a job as a police matron with the Los Angeles Police Department. There she discovers a string of brothel murders, which the cops are unwilling to investigate. Seizing her…
For me, writing novels is an attempt in metaphor to clear the ledger of unfinished business in my crazy, contradictory, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and always messy mind. All the books I've written have long and often intensely personal backstories. All of us live two lives, a life in the world of things, relationships, and time (needs), and a life in the world we create in our minds (wants). When needs and wants come into conflict we have the elements that make a novel. I see my job as a novelist to provide an exciting story and plot that carries a reader through the material world.
In 1967 I worked for seven months at DePaul psychiatric hospital in New Orleans, LA as an attendant during the 11 pm to 7 am shift. During that time period, there was often nothing to do but stay awake, because schizophrenics, like everybody else, usually sleep through the night. There was a tiny library in the "Seton Unit" section of the hospital where I worked that featured a dozen or more Nero Wolfe murder mysteries by Rex Stout. I read them all, some of them more than once. The books brought me back to my late childhood years when I read all of the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories. What fascinated me about both these sets of books later when I became a writer was the relationships between the storytellers (John Watson/Archie Goodwin) and the larger-than-life detectives (Sherlock Holmes/Nero Wolfe). They acted like bickering but loving married couples while…
As any herpetologist will tell you, the fer-de-lance is among the most dreaded snakes known to man. When someone makes a present of one to Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin knows he's getting dreadully close to solving the devilishly clever murders of an immigrant and a college president. As for Wolfe, he's playing snake charmer in a case with more twists than an anaconda -- whistling a seductive tune he hopes will catch a killer who's still got poison in his heart.
I am a professor of French Literature and Creative Writing at The Ohio State University. A Franco-American writer, I am the author of books and essays published in both France and the United States, including Posthumous America, The Paradoxes of Posterity, American Pandemonium, and Sentinel Island. My work encompasses various genres (novel, short story, essay, and critical study) to explore recurring themes: exile and the representation of otherness; disinformation and the social impact of new technologies; nostalgia and the experience of mourning; the legacy of the Enlightenment and the Age of Great Discoveries; and America’s history and its troubled present.
Conan Doyle’s masterpiece takes readers on an expedition to a remote plateau in the Amazon, where prehistoric creatures roam undisturbed.
This novel serves as a pioneering work in the genre of exploration fiction, captivating audiences with its vivid portrayal of unknown realms and the dangers they conceal. Through gripping adventure and scientific curiosity, the book explores the clash between human ambition and the natural world.
It stands as a major work, inspiring subsequent generations of explorers and storytellers to venture into the unknown.
Originally published serially in 1912, “The Lost World” is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic tale of discovery and adventure. The story begins with the narrator, the curious and intrepid reporter Edward Malone, meeting Professor Challenger, a strange and brilliant paleontologist who insists that he has found dinosaurs still alive deep in the Amazon. Malone agrees to accompany Challenger, as well as Challenger’s unconvinced colleague Professor Summerlee, and the adventurer Lord John Roxton, into the wilds of South America and the Amazon in search of Challenger’s fantastical beasts. There, cut off from the rest of civilization and high atop an isolated…
I am a storyteller and I conceived The Life of Crime as the ‘life story’ of a fascinating and truly diverse genre. I’ve always been intrigued by the ups and downs of literary lives, and the book explores the rollercoaster careers of writers from across the world. The chapter endnotes contain masses of trivia and information, as well as some original research, that I hope readers will find enjoyable as well as interesting. But The Life ofCrimeisn’t an academic text. It’s a love letter to a genre that I’ve adored for as long as I can remember.
Haycraft was an American commentator and this survey of the history of crime writing up to the Second World War is soundly written and sympathetic. Interestingly, he believed that the locked room puzzle was played out and that authors should avoid it, whereas this type of mystery has enjoyed a significant revival in recent years. Predicting how crime writing will evolve in the future is fraught with danger! Inevitably, Haycraft’s focus was mainly on American and British crime fiction. The limited number of translated mysteries in those days meant that the global reach of crime writing, and the achievements of authors whose first language is not English, has long been under-estimated. Only now is this problem being addressed.
"Genuinely fascinating reading."—The New York Times Book Review "Diverting and patently authoritative."—The New Yorker "Grand and fascinating … a history, a compendium and a critical study all in one, and all first rate."—Rex Stout "A landmark … a brilliant study written with charm and authority."—Ellery Queen "This book is of permanent value. It should be on the shelf of every reader of detective stories."—Erle Stanley Gardner Author Howard Haycraft, an expert in detective fiction, traces the genre's development from the 1840s through the 1940s. Along the way, he charts the innovations of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan…
I made the mistake of reading Dracula as an eight-year-old (thanks, Mom and Dad, for paying attention to what I brought home from school book fairs). Beyond disrupting my sleep pattern, there were two significant consequences to this decision: 1) I became enthralled with the intersection of historical detail, mystery, and magic, an enchantment that continues to this day; and 2) I ultimately majored in English literature, with a concentration in Victorian literature. To my professors’ chagrin, I put that education to use in concocting my own historically-based magical mysteries (sorry, Dr. Steinitz). But hey—I’ve always got good recommendations in this milieu.
While Sherlock Holmes famously debunked anything that had even a vague whiff of the supernatural (looking at you, Hound of the Baskervilles), the same can’t be said for his creator. Entwistle offers a brilliantly imaginative take on what might have happened if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde teamed up to solve mysteries in a world where the supernatural was very, very real. Atmospheric touches ranging from fog-shrouded, gaslit streets to mysterious moors are the perfect complement to witty dialogue, and Entwistle manages to weave in a fair bit of historical detail despite the rip-roaring pace of the story.
The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle read like a volatile cocktail of Sherlock Holmes-meets-the-X-Files with a dash of steam punk and a whiff of London fog. Conan Doyle assumes the mantle of his fictional consulting detective and recruits a redoubtable Watson in the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, who brings to the sleuthing duo a razor-keen mind, an effervescent wit, and an outrageous sense of fashion. Together, two of the greatest minds in Victorian England solve bizarre murders, unravel diabolical plots and unearth long-buried mysteries—each with a paranormal twist.“My murder will take place in a darkened séance room—shot twice…
I'm a novelis who's had a lifelong fascination with travel, lost civilizations, aquariums, swashbuckling stories (both true and fictional), dancing, dusty old bookstores and libraries, sangria, and sunny beaches. I grew up in beautiful south Louisiana and my earliest memories were in New Orleans. Living in “America's first melting pot” taught me to appreciate cultures, languages, cuisine, and music from a young age. Ancient and Medieval history and folklore remain major influences on my writing.
Master storyteller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a few things to say about Atlantis. In The Maracot Deep, young zoologist Cyrus Headley travels to the edge of a deep ocean trench with a team of explorers. Suddenly, a giant sea monster attacks them and hurls them down into the trench. The explorers are rescued by the survivors of the destroyed Atlantis, who have dwelled on the seafloor for the past 8,000 years. Will Headley and his companions ever return to the surface again, or will they remain trapped for the rest of their lives like the Atlanteans? Readers expecting this novel to be like his earlier Sherlock Holms stories are in for a surprise, as it explores the spiritual and occult ideas he pondered later in his life.
The Maracot Deep is one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's less known works that definitely deserves major recognition for its craft and originality. One of the first works of literature since the ancient historians, it explores the theme of the lost city of Atlantis in an enchanting tale about the expedition of Professor Maracot and his team of explorers to the bottom of the ocean.
As an adrenaline junky—years of kitesurfing, skydiving, bungee jumping, Zero Gravity training—I have a passion for thrills and adventure, coupled with the love for my soulmate, Virginia, since we were kids, I live what I write and write what I live. Of course, I filter it all through my vivid imagination to raise the stakes and pull you in.When I look for a great book, it’s tough to get my blood flowing, to get me excited, but these books are the nearest thing to the thrill of freefalling and having your first chute fail to open (been there, done that. Thank, God for the reserve chute!). These books are truly unique, putting you on the edge of your seat and leaving you wanting more.
A true original. Arthur Conan Doyle working -to solve a series of grisly murders. Released in 1993, it sucked me in with the first paragraph.
It mixes genres and the historical with the fictional. There are Sherlock Holmes easter eggs everywhere, the idea being this thriller informed his writing. The characters, both good and evil, flesh out the great detective in a thriller-paced adventure.
You may not have heard of the author, but you definitely heard of one of his TV shows: Twin Peaks, which he created and wrote with David Lynch. While the TV show’s known for its quirkiness, it has a fantastic underlying mystery that drove the story. Much like Frost drives the story in The List of Seven.
Christmas day, 1884 - a letter is slid under the door of a struggling young doctor and aspiring novelist, begging him to come to the aid of a mysterious woman, a victim of the black spiritual arts. From the foggy streets of London to the windswept moors of Yorkshire, a demonic conspiracy unfolds.
