A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: Q Is For Queen of Crime

 Q is for Queen of crime! Who else but Agatha Christie? But my C post was C is for Cosies. So, here she is.

My sister has read all of her books. I have still plenty more to read, but I seem to have read some of the best known. 

Her books have sold two billion copies! She is the third bestseller of all time, only outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare. There have been films and TV shows based on her books and several actors who have played her main characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. There are even Poirot novels written by Sophie Hannah, daughter of children’s writer Adele Geras. 

Agatha Christie is an entire industry. Is she over hyped? 

I don’t think so. There are books of hers I prefer to others, but they are generally worth reading. Even if you have read them often enough to know whodunnit, you don’t care. I have certainly read and reread some of them. 

Murder On The Orient Express is one novel where everyone knows how it ends, but people will reread it and go and see any dramatisation anyway. There have been only four dramatisations so far, the most recent with Kenneth Branagh - a wonderful actor, but not, in my opinion, Poirot. Too tall and thin, with an overdone moustache. But the novel does give film makers an excuse to cast many big name actors. 

It’s briefly mentioned in the British SF comedy series Red Dwarf, when Holly the ship’s computer asks to have the novels of a Agatha Christie deleted so he can read them again, and mentions he is reading that one.

I have a wonderful audiobook of the novel read by David Suchet, the best Poirot of them all. 

Although her best known characters are Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, she does have others, such as Tommy and Tuppence, a married couple who work together. There are also standalone novels, such as Murder Is Easy and The Man In The Brown Suit.

Her first novel was The Mysterious Affair At Styles, which introduced Poirot and his “Watson” Captain Arthur Hastings. She had in it a character who worked in a hospital pharmacy during the Great War, as Agatha herself did, something that helped her in her writing.

Agatha Christie didn’t mess around with mysterious non-existent poisons from South America. She used real ones. She was also part of a group of writers who agreed not to cheat readers. If you read one of her novels, you can generally work out whodunnit because it’s going to be one of a group of characters you have met already. No last-minute additions. Furthermore, it could be anyone - the Colonel, the doctor, even the sweet young thing. Nobody is out of the running. And yet, though she seems to have created the house party story, I can’t remember it ever being the butler, except one novel - not telling you which one because spoilers - in which the butler was actually an actor pretending to be a butler.

Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher novel Urn Burial was a tribute to Christie and her house party stories. It even had a character called Mary Mead after the home of Miss Marple. She did a lot of knitting and listening and was obviously inspired by Jane Marple. 

If you are interested, Project Gutenberg has several Christie books for free, as they go out of copyright. Or you can buy them. They may go out of copyright, but will be very unlikely to go out of print! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: P Is For Amelia Peabody

 The Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters(the pen name of Egyptologist Barbara Mertz) is 20 books set mainly in Egypt in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Amelia and her husband Radcliffe Emerson are archaeologists who travel to Egypt every season to dig, and have adventures, usually including a dead body or two and a mystery to solve. They meet in the first novel, The Crocodile On The Sandbank, when Amelia and her companion Evelyn, whom she had rescued in Italy, arrive in Egypt. Amelia, after years spent looking after her father, inherits his money, something her siblings don’t like. She decides to finally travel abroad and enjoy life.  Amelia marries Radcliffe(whom she calls Emerson) and Evelyn marries his brother Walter. Amelia and Emerson have a bright son, Walter, who is nicknamed Ramses for his arrogant personality. He is very precocious, knowing about languages and Egypt from early childhood onwards.  

One of the novels, The Last Camel Died At Noon, is a tribute to H. Rider Haggard and features the Emersons and their son stumbling across an ancient Egyptian colony somewhere in Nubia. There, they meet Nefret, daughter of friends who had arrived there earlier. As she is an orphan, they take her home and adopt her. Nefret doesn’t have Victorian ideas and shocks some people at home. She is a strong young woman. 

The series is very elaborate and detailed, with new characters turning up throughout the series, which goes as far as the early 1920s. During that time, the children of both couples grow up and have their own adventure. The Great War happens and an adult Ramses is involved, working for British Intelligence. There are historical characters such as Flinders Petrie and Howard Carter. There is a mysterious character known as Sethos or the Master Criminal who pops up  every so often. Their dig supervisor, Abdullah, has a large family who also take part in the adventures. 

The stories are set over 39 years, during which genuine historical events happen. It’s not like other series I’ve read, where you get about 25 novels which seem to happen over a year or two. 

They are in the form of Amelia’s journals, supposedly found and edited after being found in an attic. 

I haven’t read the entire series yet - and the last novel was published after the author’s death - but I intend to reread and finish it. The books are great fun, especially if you are interested in archaeology, which is much more than a background. The author was an Egyptologist and knew what she was doing. She also wrote another series, about a character called Vicky Bliss, but I think the Amelia Peabody books are more interesting, and better-known.

They are in print and ebook, both Kindle and Apple Books,  and should be easily available in your library, bookshop or web site.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: O Is For Richard Osman

 

I have only recently discovered Richard Osman, so only read his first novel in the Thursday Murder Club series. I have the second book all ready to read. There are four books in the series so far, with a fifth announced.

The Thursday Murder Club series is set in a retirement village, Coopers Chase, with four friends who get together on Thursdays for fun, to see if they can solve cold cases. They aren’t just any retirees. Elizabeth is a former spy. Ron was a union leader. Ibrahim is a retired psychiatrist. Joyce  a retired nurse. 

When there is a murder more or less on their doorstep they find themselves investigating, along with two police officers, who aren’t crazy about it, but eventually accept. 

There is a sleazy developer and a plan to bulldoze a nuns’ cemetery on the retirement estate, which was formerly a convent. The developer is the murder victim. There are also some past murders which are important in solving this one. 

This is a cosy mystery, of course, and among all the investigations there is the beautiful countryside, which I thought I’d enjoy exploring if it was a real place. But there are also some deaths that are rather sad, unexpected in this sort of mystery.

I see that there is a forthcoming film, directed by Chris Columbus, of Harry Potter fame, with an amazing cast. Our four heroes are being played by Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie. Other roles are played by the likes of Jonathan Pryce, Richard E. Grant and David Tennant. There must have been a big budget, but then the rights were acquired by Stephen Spielberg. There should be a lot of money here. 

According to the web site, there are plans to show it first at the cinema, then on Netflix. One way or another, it should be well worth a watch.

The books are new enough and should be available at either your local bookshop or online. I bought my copies of the first two as ebooks. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: N Is For Non-Fiction

 Non-fiction crime writing is usually called “true crime”. I’ve written some myself(see below). But I also read quite a lot of it while researching for my own book. 

True crime is very popular. People do want to know what really happened. Kids love it too; I had five copies of my book on my library shelves and it was borrowed so much that all of them were falling apart by the end of the year. 

One of the books I used in my research was Underbelly: The Gangland War by John Silvester and Andrew Rule. The two authors are both crime journalists. John Silvester is still writing a crime column for the Melbourne newspaper The Age. In fact, the book is based on a series of newspaper articles they wrote about Melbourne’s gangland wars, which were big news at the time. Everybody was talking about them, and the criminal families who were fighting and killing each other. One of them, drug trafficker Tony Mokbel, escaped to Greece by boat, but was caught in Greece and brought back. He has, at this writing, been in prison for 18 years, but is appealing and has been let out on bail. 

The book was fictionalised into a TV series, though that wasn’t shown in Victoria when it came out because the subjects were on trial at the time and showing it might have led to bias. A bit silly, really, as it was easy enough for Sydney people, for example, to record it for family and friends in Melbourne, but I suppose they didn’t want to take a chance. 

If interested, you can buy it in ebook, and I’m guessing you can still find it in print.

As I said above, I used it as part of my research for my children’s book Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly. Yes, I wrote a book about crime for kids, about 9 to 12. One of my Year 7 students told me that it had been withdrawn from the shelves at his primary school because kids in  Year 2, including himself, wanted to read it! I gave him a copy, signed to him with “You are now old enough to read this.” He read it in a weekend, bless him.

It includes the gangland wars, but historical stories from the Batavia incident (17th century mutiny off the coast of Western Australia) onwards. I made sure that there were the sort of gruesome stories kids love, but not written to create any nightmares for the young readers. Some, like the April Fool’s Day robbery, were written for fun. That was the story of two idiots who went to rob the Dandenongs restaurant the Cuckoo on April Fool’s Day and left with nothing but a bag of stale bread rolls the manager was taking home to feed his chickens.  

Here is the trailer made for YouTube. It was created by a teenager on work experience, but I thought he did a very good job. 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aT12MtGyxoA&pp=ygUbQ3JpbWUgVGltZSBTdWUgQnVyc3p0eW5za2kg

I am still proud of this book, which was shortlisted for the Scarlet Stiletto Award. 

If you are interested, the publisher still has a few copies for  Australian readers, but I have some copies I can sell you if you want print. Or you can get it easily in ebook, both Apple Books and Kindle.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: M Is For Shane Maloney

 Shane Maloney is an Aussie author who lives in Melbourne. At one stage he was writing a column for the Age newspaper  but he has done other jobs, from director of the Melbourne Comedy Festival to a lifeguard.

His six-novel Murray Whelan series is set very distinctly in Melbourne. If you live there as I do, you recognise the places mentioned in the books. I’ve only read four of the series, I didn’t even know there were more till recently. 

Murray Whelan works for a Victorian Labor government, starting in the 1980s, when there was a Labor government in power. His politicians are fictional, though. 

His job isn’t investigating murders, but somehow he always ends up finding a dead body and finding out whodunnit. 

In Stiff, the first novel, a dead body is found in a freezer at a meat packing workshop. Murray is ordered to investigate, because there may be some embarrassment for the Labor party. Murray has no idea how to do it, but does his best. 

The second novel, The Brush-Off, has a dead body found in the pool of the National Gallery(the gallery is real, the victim isn’t). This novel won the prestigious Ned Kelly Award and was short listed for the Premier’s Literary award. 

In one novel, somebody is hit over the head with a mobile phone, in the days when not everyone had one and they were much heavier than they are now,

Murray is a klutz. He is, in fact, very lucky not to be killed in the course of the series. 

Eventually he becomes a politician himself. 

Only two of the books were filmed, the first two, Stiff and The Brush-Off, but in them the role of Murray was played by David Wenham, whom you have probably seen at least once, in Lord Of The Rings, as Faramir. If you live in Australia you may well have seen him in Sea Change, in which he played the very sexy Diver Dan. The films are worth chasing up, if you can. 

The books and TV show alike are great fun and the books are still available, both in print and ebook, Amazon, Dymocks and Apple Books. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: L Is For Lois McMaster Bujold

 

Okay, I’m cheating again, but you’ll soon see that I am thinking of mystery, despite the science fictional theme of the author’s book series. 

Lois McMaster Bujold is the author of a series of space operas about a man called Miles Vorkosigan, the son of Prime Minister Aral Vorkosigan on the planet Barrayar and his wife Captain Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony. 

Miles was born badly formed due to a murder attempt when his mother was pregnant. Despite his problems, he has managed to get medical treatment for his fragile bones, among other things, and is very bright. 

The first several books in the series show him as a space mercenary, working also for Impsec(Imperial Security), but eventually he loses his job due to lying to his boss, Simon Illyan, in a novel called Memory. However, he solves the mystery of why Simon has been behaving strangely and forgetting where he never did before - he has a chip in his brain that is supposed to keep everything in his memory. As a result, Miles is appointed an Imperial Auditor, with the job of finding out things that seem fishy on the planets of the Empire. So the novels from then on are mysteries, which Miles uses his brain to investigate. There are mystery elements in other books set in this universe, such as Cetaganda, in which Miles and his cousin Ivan represent Barrayar at an Imperial funeral on the title planet. There is a murder and the theft of a vital object. Miles investigates and, of course, finds out whodunnit. 

If you like an unusual mystery set in the far future, this series is a lot of fun. 

Alas, the author has ended the series and focused on secondary world fantasy, but there is still plenty to enjoy. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: K Is For Kerry Greenwood

 

I had planned to make this post K for Faye Kellerman, who writes stories about an ultra Orthodox Jewish couple who solve mysteries, but this week, we lost the wonderful Kerry Greenwood, the author of the Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman novels, and I can’t leave her out. Kerry was sick for  a very long time, so maybe I should have expected it, but it was still a shock to hear about it on Wednesday. I’ll pop Faye Kellerman into X for Xtras.

I discovered Kerry Greenwood some years ago, when she was mentioned in the Age newspaper. I have always enjoyed historical crime fiction, and the thought of a 1920s woman detective who zips around Melbourne in a bright red Hispano Suiza car was utterly intriguing. I bought a copy of the first novel, Cocaine Blues, and started bingeing on all the books that were available at the time, and reading them all as they came out. 

There are twenty-two Phryne Fisher novels, with one more - the very last - to come out later this year, plus a volume of short stories. 

There will be no more Corinna Chapman books, alas. A pity because Corinna Chapman, that enthusiastic baker, was a lot more like Kerry than Phryne. 

Kerry described her heroine as Simon Templar’s younger sister. She decided to set the whole series in 1928, because she had researched that year, including the 1928 wharfie strike. She hadn’t expected it to be so popular and last so long, so while Cocaine Blues started in May of 1928, most of the novels were somehow crammed into the rest of 1928, though she seems to have given up, and the last few books were set in early 1929, before the Depression began. She made Phryne smart enough to invest in businesses that would always be needed - basic foods and land. So if it did get as far as the Depression, Phryne would still be rich.

The TV series, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, didn’t cover all the books, and the third season was was made up of original stories. I quite enjoyed the later shows, because they were able to fit stories into the time available. The episodes based on the novels can’t cram everything into an hour. Phryne’s boyfriend Lin Chung, so much a part of the books, barely appears at all, and instead of being a silk merchant, his grandmother runs a Chinese restaurant. 

Essie Davis, who played Phryne Fisher, was perfectly cast. She looked like Phryne. They implied a romance between her and Inspector Jack Robinson, who was happily married with children in the books.

The series was historically accurate, from the scenery to the costumes. They had Kerry to advise on that. The costumes included some that were very old. I saw an exhibition of them and they were breathtaking from close up. 

It’s sad to think there will be no more books - and even sadder that Kerry is gone. She was a delightful, cheery person everyone liked. 

RIP Kerry!