Mystery Series Research Articles

Moving beyond the magic Indian Trope in Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire series

AbstractIn films, the Magic Negro is a stock character whose supernatural gifts promote the success of a White protagonist. A character with parallel traits found in a number of mystery series is the Magic Indian, who has supernatural connections and abilities unavailable to others. In his Walt Longmire mysteries, Craig Johnson develops a strong supernatural thread with the agency of Native American characters who can be considered Magic Indians. While Johnson's Magic Indians share similarities with Magic Negroes, they exhibit key differences in the way their spirituality is presented that make them more realistic characters serving an educational function.

If I See You Again Tomorrow by Robbie Couch (review)

Reviewed by: If I See You Again Tomorrow by Robbie Couch Aaren Tucker Couch, Robbie If I See You Again Tomorrow. Simon, 2023 [336p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781534497498 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781534497511 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 8-12 Clark has been stuck in September 19th for 309 days before he finally tells his therapist the truth: he's lonely. Partly it's due to his parents' divorce, partly due to his best friend moving to another state, but mostly it's due to the September 19th time loop itself, of which only Clark is aware. Clark's confession, however, prompts the first deviation in 309 consecutive days when his therapist gives him four tips to beating loneliness, the first of which is to make a new friend. Making a new friend in a time loop seems impossible until day 310, when a boy whom Clark has never seen before in all the previous September 19ths shows up in his trig class, and the two end up spending a whirlwind afternoon together. Beau doesn't appear again on day 311, though, and Clark wonders if Beau could be stuck in the time loop as well, and if so, perhaps together they can finally learn how to escape. The time loop mechanic has the potential to be repetitive, but Couch makes the excellent decision to begin [End Page 253] the narrative right at the moment that things in Clark's Groundhog Day begin to change. The story is structured around a series of deviations and mysteries; as each mystery is solved, a new one springs up, spurring the plot onward and making the novel compulsively readable. In addition to excellent structure and pacing, Couch also provides a compelling, endearing narrator in Clark as a teen struggling to see beyond the end of his nose in his increasingly narrowing world for which the time loop is only partly to blame. In order to escape, Clark has to grow up and seize upon the rare opportunity the universe has granted him: a chance to do better. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Kryminały (są) dla dziewczyn… — refleksje wokół cyklu detektywistycznego Karen Karbo o Minervie Clark

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in detective literature among the youngest readers. The appeal of this type of literature is confirmed not only by a kind of “publication overproduction” observable in the segment of books for children and young adults, but also by reader rankings. The latter also show two significant trends: firstly — the declining age of the youngest readers who choose detective stories, secondly — girls are beginning to prevail among the young recipients of this literature.
 The goal of the article is to seek an answer to the question why young girls increasingly often choose detective literature and what makes it attractive from the reception perspective. The example which is the focus of attention is the mystery-type trilogy written by American author Karen Karbo about the adventures of an eccentric teenager Minerva Clark. The series consists of the following volumes: Minerva Clark Gets a Clue, Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs, and Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost, all of which can be categorized as classical detective stories.
 The latest detective fiction for young girls, which readily utilizes gender and feminist topics, features more and more characters of brave and independent female amateur detectives. Minerva Clark has joined this colorful gallery of characters, who appeared in the twentieth-century literature thanks to Miss Marple novels authored by Agatha Christie. The literary character of Minerva Clark arouses associations with another fictional character meant for female teenage readers — Nancy Drew, the titular hero of American novels Nancy Drew Mystery Series, published in the USA since the 1930s.
 Minerva Clark has become part of the contemporary discourse on femininity and the role of gender in popular culture. The popularity of the trilogy in question as well as the whole trend of detective stories for girls can be explained in several ways. Apart from the feminine topic repertoire, the literary factors are of significance: suspense-keeping stories, captivating plots, young people’s slang, and most of all — humor, highly thought of by the young audience. In Karen Karbo’s series we are dealing with verbal-intellectual and situational comedy as well as that of characters. The content-related comedy-making factors in the trilogy about Minerva Clark also include humorous narration (play on words), situational scenes, and a happy ending. Books about female teenage detectives such as Minerva evoke a substantial response among their gender also because they are written with present-day girls and their needs in mind.

Fiddling with Southern California at a Time of Upheaval: A.E. Maxwell’s Mystery Series

Between 1985 and 1993, Ann Maxwell (aka Elizabeth Lowell) and her husband Evan, a former L.A. Times crime reporter who covered international crime, co-authored a series of neo-noir crime novels featuring the private-eye narrator Fiddler, an independently wealthy, Newport-based macho man with a moral compass and a shady past from which his wealth is derived, and his partner Fiora, a high-powered Orange County banker who made her way into high finance from a humble midwestern background. While the series’s plots and characters follow established genre conventions, the novels’ settings cannily spotlight regions and locales relevant to California in which the geopolitical transformations of the later 1980s and early 1990s were concentrated. The upheaval of California’s social fabric in places such as the Gold Coast, Orange County, Napa Valley, the Mexican border, and even Santa Fe (Los Angeles’s alter ego) provide the background for plots that range from Cold War spies and smugglers to a white-collar breed of criminals such as property development scammers, art forgers, and financial fraudsters, exposing the violent and criminal underbelly of a rapidly globalizing and accelerating economic system in which (some parts of) California played a central role. This article provides a geocritical reading of the mystery series that focuses on its modes of political and social critique of the era of Reaganomics, globalization, and the financialization of property, technology, and culture. The series reveals a sustained engagement with political, social, and cultural upheavals that position these locales as sites of contestation and struggles that are, or turn, violent in a variety of ways.

Women and Crime: Exploring the Role of Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Constructions of Female Criminality

This roundtable on women and crime was inspired by a discussion at a CUNY Dissections Seminar in April 2021, where Gülhan Balsoy presented her work in progress on Ottoman crime fiction in the early 20th century. The focus of her paper was a popular murder mystery series called The National Collection of Murders, which had been published in Istanbul in 1914. The protagonists of this fictional crime series were a mother and daughter known as the Dark Witch and the Bloody Fairy, who led an underground criminal gang living in a secret subterranean world beneath the city of Istanbul. While reading her paper the night before the seminar, I could not help but notice striking parallels between this fictional Ottoman murder mystery and the sensationalized media coverage of a 1921 Egyptian serial murder case, popularly known by the name of its alleged perpetrators, Raya and Sakina. In both the fictive Ottoman story and the Egyptian media coverage of a real crime, two sets of female relatives were presented as the respective leaders of a criminal gang that stole luxury goods from respectable families and turned their homes into human slaughterhouses. In both cases, the female gang leaders used “superstition” to deceive and trap their victims while continually outwitting the police, all against a backdrop of illicit sex.

Morkrets Makter’s Mini-Mysteries

The discussion about Bram Stoker’s possible contribution to Morkrets makter, the Swedish version of Dracula, and about the identity of the anonymous Swedish editor/translator, has reached no definitive conclusions yet. This paper addresses a series of minor mysteries linked to the Swedish variants: the possible connections between the Budapest, the Chicago and the Stockholm serialisations; the use of certain names (Draculitz, Mary Wood, Valentini’s, Zolyva, Koromeszo); references to the Whitechapel Murders and the Thames Torso Mysteries, among others. Although these observations provide no definitive proof regarding the authorship of Mörkrets makter, taken together, they seem to show subtle support for the idea that these Dracula modifications were created entirely in Sweden.

The Girl Detective

The Girl Detective Jeannine Hall Gailey (bio) was born looking for clues.In pockets, in closets, behind staircasesand lighthouses, in the ashes of the housethat caught on fire. I’m searching for tracesof computer code, for digital signatures,for fingerprints on goblets, for the soundtrackof the mystery series that is my life. I was bornwith titian hair and a penchant for secrets. When you lose your mother, you keep searchingeverywhere for her. You keep a lock of her hairin your diary. You keep a key that onceopened a safe that no longer exists.There’s no such thing as ghosts,but you keep seeing them anyway. With so many hidden cameras now, so manycell phones, you’d think you wouldn’t need meskulking in the shadows, trailing the suspect,adding things up and taking away the receipts.But there’s always a false bottom to the drawer,a hidden passage, a trap door, a note the murdervictim left before she died in invisible ink,or scrawled on a window. A scarf the policedidn’t notice. A footprint. That’s it: the things we lose aren’t alwaysso easy to track. The ghosts we seek stay just beyond [End Page 113] our reach. But don’t worry; I won’t leave my post.My blue convertible a chariot for lost souls.I’ll be here, always vigilant for that missedconnection, a guidepost for the misplaced. [End Page 114] Jeannine Hall Gailey Jeannine Hall Gailey is a poet with multiple sclerosis who served as the second poet laureate of Redmond, Washington. She’s the author of six books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, Field Guide to the End of the World (winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the Elgin Award), and the upcoming Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. She has a bs in biology and ma in English from the University of Cincinnati and an mfa from Pacific University. Her work has appeared in such journals as the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and POETRY magazine. Visit www.webbish6.com and @webbish6 (Twitter and Instagram) Copyright © 2021 University of Nebraska Press

Unusual presentations of abdominal tuberculosis: A case series of clinical mysteries

Abdominal tuberculosis is one of the common extra pulmonary tuberculosis with diverse clinical manifestations. It has high disease burden in endemic countries like India leading to significant morbidity and mortality when left untreated. It is of vital importance to treat to prevent significant disease related mortality. We report 4 patients of abdominal tuberculosis who presented with atypical presentations. The aim of our case series is to know the uncommon presentations of a common disease.

The Art of Detection: An Interview with Carmen Amato, Author of the Award-Winning Emilia Cruz Mystery Series

The Art of Detection: An Interview with Carmen Amato, Author of the Award-Winning Emilia Cruz Mystery Series

“We had to be very clear that they weren't going to try to break into any of the cases”: what potential do ‘escape rooms’ offer as a science communication technique?

‘Escape rooms’ are a recent cultural phenomena, whereby a group of ‘players’, often friends or colleagues, are ‘locked’ in a room and must solve a series of clues, puzzles, or mysteries in order to ‘escape’. Escape rooms are increasingly appearing in a range of settings, including science centres and museums, libraries and university programmes, but what role can an escape room play in science communication? In this commentary, we explore the emerging literature on escape rooms as well as thoughts from a small number of escape room creators in the U.S. and U.K.

Victim-naming in the murder mystery TV series Twin Peaks: a corpus-stylistic study

Corpus linguistics is advancing rapidly in the study of a wide variety of genres, but is still at its infancy in the study of TV series, a genre daily consumed by millions of viewers. Murder mystery series are one of the most popular and proliferous, but no studies, to date, have used corpus-stylistics methodologies in the analysis of the pivotal character of the victim in the whole narrative. This paper applied this methodology hoping to shed some light on the quantitative and qualitative relationship between the participation roles of the characters, and the frequency and distribution of victim-naming choices in the dialogue of the two first seasons of the acclaimed TV series Twin Peaks. The analysis proved that textual reference to the victim in the dialogues is a central genre-cohesive device which may serve as a waymark to guide the audience throughout the many subplots of the series.

Books: Laugh out Dead: an Urban-Smith Mystery: Supernatural Mirth.

Rupert Harker The Blue Belvoir , 2018 , PB, 299 pp, £ 7.99 , 978-1913006013 Laugh out Dead is an interesting title that caught my attention. Following his interest in pathology as a medical student, Rupert Harker was inspired to write this book by watching classic Sherlock Holmes. It is the first book in a self-published Urban-Smith Mystery series. The main character is the curiously named forensic pathologist Rupert Harker, who meets …

From “Beach Read” to Ethnic Urban Drama: Steinbeck's Imprint on the Twenty-First-Century Novel

Abstract Without question, the writings of John Steinbeck, one half century after his death, remain multifaceted cultural touchstones. Their presence and impact are apparent in a variety of venues: in talking points regarding contemporary migration debates, in criminal cases referencing the “Lenny Standard,” and in Sarah Fox's Pancake House Mystery Series, which includes such titles as Yeast of Eden, The Crêpes of Wrath, and Of Spice and Men. This paper explores how Steinbeck's distinctive and diverse literary styles have made their way into two diverse novels of the millennium. Emma Straub's The Vacationers, selected by New York magazine as one of “The 100 Best Beach Reads,” echoes plot and character elements from Steinbeck's 1947 novel of travel, The Wayward Bus. And the textured themes and narrative framework of Steinbeck's iconic novel of migration to California, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), are revisited and updated in Tommy Orange's 2018 novel of Native American life in the Golden State, There There.

Leveraging structural relationships as a novel mode of viral classification

100 years have passed since the independent discovery of the humble bacteriophage (phage) by Frederick Twort and Felix d’Herelle in 1915 and 1917 respectively, and since then, it has become commonly accepted that phages represent the most abundant biological entities on Earth. Despite this fact, viral taxonomy lies in extremely treacherous waters, ever changing to accommodate the next series of phylogenetic mysteries. The utilisation of genes such as the terminase large sub-unit can in some cases provide a robust taxonomic marker, but this is often found to fail at higher taxonomic levels. In addition, the rapid evolutionary dynamics and highly modular nature of phages provide yet more phylogenetic roadblocks, necessitating additional and multifaceted approaches as a means of resolution. Here, we describe a novel approach towards the taxonomic classification of phage systems. Tools for accurately predicting the three dimensional structure of proteins are improving at an unprecedented rate due to the fact that the number of protein sequences far exceeds the number of experimentally determined structures. Our approach leverages these methods through a pipeline which compares models of phage marker genes in order to permit the inference of phylogenetic relationships based on cross model superimposition. We hope this method will supplement other approaches in providing a more holistic approach to viral classification.

Climate Fiction as Environmental Education

Climate Fiction as Environmental Education

The Borderlands of Belief: Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins Mysteries

Merrily Watkins is a highly unconventional Anglican priest and exorcist, and her eponymous mystery series represents the church she serves as hopelessly out of touch culturally and morally. Such distance from conventional Christianity manifests a sensibility increasingly called postsecular: distaste for the power moves of organized religion alongside acknowledgement that the ongoing contemporary quest for and experience of transcendent meaning disproves triumphalist secularization. The series prioritizes Christianity within this anti-dogmatic religious landscape because of Christianity’s stable systems of symbol and ritual and its cruciform ethics of humility and faithfulness uniquely appropriate to approach the most important mysteries in the world.

Algunas incógnitas, precisiones e incertidumbres sobre la vida y la muerte de Alonso Álvarez de Soria

It has been commonly assumed that the historical reference to the death of the Sevillian poet Alonso Alvarez de Soria made in Quevedo’s Buscon signals the terminus a quo for the composition of the work. In his biography of Alvarez de Soria, Rodriguez Marin argued that his execution did take place at the end of 1603 or at the beginning of 1604, and this hypothesis has been maintained and repeated so long without being questioned. But the fact is that there are no known documents that can help to verify the date of Alvarez de Soria’s execution. A systematic examination of the existing documentation on the poet and of the annals, ephemerides and local chronicles composed in Seville during the years related to Alvarez de Soria’s death have not allowed to find any mention or clue of the event. Only literary testimonies, which are here also provided, have transmitted this notice. A series of mysteries and uncertainties, which are underlined, arise as future lines of research.

Lost Soul, Be at Peace by Maggie Thrash

Reviewed by: Lost Soul, Be at Peace by Maggie Thrash Elizabeth Bush Thrash, Maggie Lost Soul, Be at Peace; written and illus. by Maggie Thrash. Candlewick, 2018 [192p] ISBN 978-0-7636-9419-7 $18.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 In this sequel to her graphic memoir Honor Girl (BCCB 11/15), Thrash picks up her story in junior year, where she's deeply depressed, flunking her classes, and feeling completely alienated from her Atlanta socialite mother and her oblivious, workaholic federal judge father. Her cat Tommi is her one reliable object of affection, but the pet somehow goes missing in their enormous mansion. During her searches for Tommi, Maggie encounters a series of mysteries and a possible ghost, who gives her often unwanted but much needed perspective on her misery ("Oh poor you. Your mansion is so big you lost your cat inside it. Boo-hoo") and ultimately helps her recognize what makes her father tick, bringing her greater understanding and sympathy. Figures are minimally drawn with casual, stylized directness, and they effectively convey traits that strongly influence Maggie's relationships: the newspaper that shields her father's face, the truncated run-on sentences that cram her mother's nattering speech bubbles, the delicate translucency of the "ghost" (revealed to be her father as a teenager), the evil Tommi that haunts her dreams. In a closing note Thrash comments on the facts at the core of her tale—privilege, loneliness, coming out, and yes, a lost cat—and how she reconciles memoir with ghost story. Readers who met Maggie in her Camp Bellflower summer will be happy to see her work her way toward acceptance. EB Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

“The Blood Never Stops Flowing and the Party Never Ends”: The Originals and the Afterlife of New Orleans as a Vampire City

“The Blood Never Stops Flowing and the Party Never Ends”: The Originals and the Afterlife of New Orleans as a Vampire City

A Working-Class Sherlock

Timothy Sheard, the Lenny Moss mystery series (New York: Hardball).At its best, the art of fiction reveals the underlying truth of human relations: we are communal and collaborative by nature. Selfishness and greed are social aberrations because, ultimately, they violate the principle of self-preservation. No wonder we are drawn to crime stories: they mirror our common experience. Capitalism is high crime disguised as church doctrine. Conspiracy is evident, though the evidence is concealed. Hence, our fascination with the detective genre. We are in dire need of Timothy Sheard's scrutiny—a detective who peers through a working-class eyeglass.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.