Crime Fiction Alphabet: Letter N

I have signed up for a second year of The Alphabet in Crime Fiction, a community meme sponsored by Mysteries in Paradise. Each week she'll be expecting participants to produce a post featuring a mystery/crime novel or novelist related to that week's letter. 

I hope our hostess and my fellow alphabet tourists will forgive me for wandering aimlessly about this summer and totally losing my way.  I skipped out on "J," managed to rejoin the group for "K," and got lost again on "L" and "M."  So....we're all ready for "N," are we?  Okay....

N is for Meredith Nicholson (hey!  this could make up for me missing "M" too!).  What do you mean you never heard of Meredith Nicholson?  Why, he's that best-selling author (newspaperman, politician, and diplomat) from Indiana.  Most of his writing focuses on the triumph of young love over various obstacles thrown in its path. This is true, in a way, even of the mystery novel that I read this year.  He was born in 1866 in Crawfordsville and had three books hit the bestseller list:

• The House of a Thousand Candles (#4 in 1906)
• The Port of Missing Men (#3 in 1907)
• A Hoosier Chronicle (#5 in 1912)

Not nearly as well known today as his contemporaries, Booth Tarkington and James Whitcomb Riley, he is, however credited with helping to create a Golden Age of Indiana literature.  (We had a Golden Age of literature here in Indiana?  I never realized.  I mean--I knew about Tarkington and Riley, but can't say I ever thought of them in the same sentence as Golden Age.)  The main reason I know anything at all about Nicholson is that I did a reading challenge (no, really, Bev? you--do a reading challenge? surely not).  And the challenge required that we read one novel set in the state/province where we live.  By chance, I had picked up Nicholson's The House of a Thousand Candles at our library's used book shop sometime last year--so I promptly made that my choice.


For a much better look at Meredith Nicholson than I've given here, please click on his name.  And for a review of The House of a Thousand Candles, please click above.