Wheredunnit?

From: Roxanne's Reflections Book & Card Shop

In the past, the quintessential setting of a mystery or detective novel was always either 1) the mean streets of some heartless and corrupt US city, or 2) the musty and genteel drawing room of an country manor near a quaint village named Burton-le-Coggles, or some such place. I'm exaggerating, but you get the picture.

     What is really gratifying about the crime fiction of today is that setting has been liberated. We have entered a world where anywhere is ripe for skulduggery and intrigue: from Stieg Larrson's Sweden to Donna Leon's Italy.
     And who can forget our own home-grown bounty of books by such crime fiction masters as Louise Penny (Quebec), Howard Shrier and Robert Rotenberg (Toronto), and Anthony Bidulka (Saskatchewan)? 

"What a great honour to be asked to be Writer in Residence for this month, and to proudly hold the banner of Canadian Crime Fiction. Especially since that banner has been designed and created by some of the world’s best writers—who also happen to be Canadian, and happen to use crime fiction to explore what it means to be human. Giles Blunt, Maureen Jennings, Barbara Fradkin, Peter Robinson (a Brit, but a man who chooses to live in Canada, so we bestow upon him the honour), William Deverell, Ian Hamilton—and many, many more."
— Louise Penny, CBC Books
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"A four-day blizzard has left the village of Three Pines looking like a toy town sheltered under a snow globe. But this secluded Canadian hamlet, tucked away in a valley deep in the mountains, contributes more than its picturesque setting to Louise Penny’s latest mystery, How the Light Gets In. You might even say Three Pines is the hero of the novel.
     Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, the honorable detective in this series, often visits the village just to let its eccentric but kindhearted residents restore his faith in humanity. This time the inspector comes looking for something more — a safe haven. Demoralized and increasingly isolated, Gamache is battling an unscrupulous superior.
     'We’ve killed his career, his department. We’ve killed his credibility and broken his spirit,' gloats one of the man’s conspirators. But when the safety of two loyal friends is compromised by their undercover research into rampant police corruption, Gamache is able to spirit them away to Three Pines."
— Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
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Elmore Leonard (Oct. 11, 1925 - August 20, 2013)

"Elmore Leonard, the prolific crime novelist whose louche characters, deadpan dialogue and immaculate prose style in novels like Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky and Glitz established him as a modern master of American genre writing, died on Tuesday at his home in Bloomfield Village, Mich. He was 87.

     His death was announced on his Web site.
     To his admiring peers, Mr. Leonard did not merely validate the popular crime thriller; he stripped the form of its worn-out affectations, reinventing it for a new generation and elevating it to a higher literary shelf.
     Reviewing Riding the Rap for The New York Times Book Review in 1995, Martin Amis cited Mr. Leonard’s 'gifts — of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing — that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet.'
     As the American chapter of PEN noted, when honoring Mr. Leonard with its Lifetime Achievement award in 2009, his books 'are not only classics of the crime genre, but some of the best writing of the last half-century.'”
— Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
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See a related post here...

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Disappearing Act

"The five finalists for the 2012 National Book Award for fiction make for an exemplary shortlist — and I say that even though none of them is likely to end up on my own best-of list at the end of the year. [...]
      What you won’t find, however, is the book that many, many literary fiction buffs read and loved in the past six months: Gillian Flynn’s best-selling crime novel, Gone Girl. Flynn’s book is inventive, shrewd, mercilessly observant and stylishly written — qualities that are very welcome and likely to be celebrated in a literary novel. Her theme, the dissolution of a marriage in recession-era America, is substantive. Her technique (which, at the risk of spoilage, I’ll vaguely refer to as unreliable narration) is sophisticated. But let’s face it: Gone Girl is still considered a crime novel, and the likelihood of any work of genre fiction being seriously considered for a major literary prize still seems as far-fetched in 2012 as the election of a black president looked to be in the 20th century."
— Laura Miller, Salon
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“'This is the hardest part,' confides one of the untrustworthy narrators in Gone Girl [...] 'waiting for stupid people to figure things out.' There’s no need to rub it in, because Gillian Flynn’s latest novel of psychological suspense will confound anyone trying to keep up with her quicksilver mind and diabolical rules of play. Not that there’s anything underhanded about her intentions: she promises to deliver an account of the troubled marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne, who alternate as narrators, and so she does. The trickery is in the devilish way she tells their story."

—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times
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