Kerrie over at Mysteries in Paradise is sponsoring The Alphabet in Crime Fiction community meme. Your post MUST be related to either the first letter of a book's title, the first letter of an author's first name, or the first letter of the author's surname. So you see you have lots of choice. You could write a review, or a bio of an author, so long as it fits the rules somehow. (It is ok too to skip a week.) Link your post for the week back to Kerrie's site.This week we are featuring the letter H.
I think I'm going to go with another female pioneer in the detective fiction world. H is for Helen Reilly. Reilly's career reached from 1930-1962. I just finished one of her early novels, McKee of Centre Street. And did a little background on her in the process. She was one of the first authors to feature police procedure in her work and she based her novels on research she had done on the New York homicide squad. Inspector Christopher McKee is her central detective and she shows him at work with a full complement of supporting officers--from fingerprint men to detectives ordered to shadow suspects. A few of her later works have been said to fall into the Had I But Known school of mysteries, but so far the three I've read have all been more centered on the police work than the suspenseful qualities of HIBK. For a taste of what her work is like, feel free to click on the title above for my review.
Bev - Thanks for this really interesting information! I always like learning a little about the authors I read. And I didn't know that Reilly had pioneered police work. That's interesting.
ReplyDeleteI haven't come across Helen Reilly. It's good to find new-to-me authors, especially ones from the early years of crime fiction.
ReplyDeleteSuch interesting authors emerge in the CFA posts! Another I haven't come across before. Thanks for participating Bev.
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