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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Continental Op And Women, Mary Freier
The Continental Op And Women, Mary Freier
Mollie Freier
The Continental Op, by his own admission, does not fit the stereotype of the hardboiled detective. At five foot six, one hundred ninety pounds, he would be more likely to be played on film by Danny DeVito or Jason Alexander than Humphrey Bogart or Alan Ladd. However, Dinah Brand, the primary female character in Red Harvest, does not conform to the stereotype of the femme fatale. In many ways, the Op is much more practical than his counterparts in Hammett’s other fiction, and Dinah Brand, a large, powerful woman, is drastically different from her counterparts as well. In this paper, …
Cats As Detectives In Library Mysteries, Mary Freier
Cats As Detectives In Library Mysteries, Mary Freier
Mollie Freier
Cats have become ubiquitous as detectives or detective assistants in twenty-first century mysteries, although the trend began with the “The Cat Who” books, the first of which was published in the nineteen-sixties. Cats have a fine history in the detective genre, but current depictions of cats as detectives include the cats conversing with other animals and even the human detective in the novel. Some of these cats possess supernatural abilities, and even those who don't possess impressive intelligence. Cats are notorious, of course, for being curious, and the librarians who function as amateur sleuths are similar in this regard. Some …
Rare Books In Detective Fiction: Information As Object, Mary Freier
Rare Books In Detective Fiction: Information As Object, Mary Freier
Mollie Freier
Library mysteries written since 1970 often depict intrigue surrounding the theft or threatened theft of rare books. Charles Goodrum, a director of the Library of Congress, once wrote that when he decided to write a mystery novel set in a library, he spent an evening coming up with ideas for such a novel. He said that he came up with dozens, but settled on a plot about rare book theft because he thought it would be more accessible to general readers. Many other mystery writers have made the same decision. Although these mysteries are often considered library mysteries and frequently …