Bangor Community Seminar - 2010
Not The Usual Suspects: The Literary Mystery
Facilitator: Margery Irvine (bio)
Location: Bangor Public Library, 145 Harlow Street, Bangor
| January 12, 2010 | A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler | |
| February 9, 2010 | The Pale Criminal by Phillip Kerr | |
| March 9, 2010 | Christine Falls by Benjamin Black | |
| April 13, 2010 | The Year of the Dog by Henry Chang | |
| May 11, 2010 | When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson | |
| June 8, 2010 | A Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon |
All meetings are on Tuesdays, 6:00-8:30 pm
[Snow Dates: The Tuesday following a Tuesday cancellation]
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Our books this year all re-define the mystery novel, creating, in effect, a genre of their own. Complex in plot and character, their close attention to setting and detail make them especially compelling, as well as a lot of fun to read. Wherever they take place—and it could be just about anywhere on earth—they offer us a world of ambiguous morality and difficult choices.
January A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler. It’s 1939, Europe is on the brink of war, and Charles Lattimer searches from Istanbul to Paris for material for a new detective story.
February The Pale Criminal, by Phillip Kerr. 1938 this time, Berlin, and Bernhard Gunther, Private Investigator, is on the case.
March Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black. Dublin pathologist Garret Quirke goes to Boston, in the 1950s, to discover who murdered a young maid.
April The Year of the Dog, by Henry Chang. Manhattan’s Chinatown becomes almost a character in this complex mystery that takes place in the 1990s.
May When Will There Be Good News?, by Kate Atkinson. Jackson Brodie makes his third appearance in another of Atkinson’s Edinburgh mysteries, just as masterfully plotted as the first two.
June The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon. Meyer Landsman has a lot of problems—his drinking, depression, failed marriage—but finding a body in his hotel gets his mind off Reversion, when the Jewish state of Sitka, Alaska goes back to being a part of the US. Don’t ask.
You can download the Word document of the syllabus.
