Margaret Truman Daniels dies

During our last book club session, one attendee mentioned how he enjoyed Margaret Truman's mystery novels--although it came with qualifiers. He commented that he grew up in the Washington area and enjoyed the travelogues aspects of the books. The mysteries in the books were slight to his liking though.

Unfortunately, Truman's work has ended as her death was announced on the news Tuesday. Margaret Truman was a mainstay in mystery fiction with a mystery series in and about the Washington D.C. area. The daughter of President Harry Truman, Margaret Truman Daniels lived to be 83 years-old.

Walking back in the mystery section, I noticed 19 separate titles alone at our library. She had a great niche with writing about mysteries in Washington and her books--from what I noticed--enjoyed a good readership. Sometime, I'll have to try one too.

Here's part of the obituary from the The New York Times [the photo--taken before the mystery series began--comes from Yahoo!]: Mrs. Daniel’s foray into mysteries was an outgrowth of her years as a devotee of the genre. “I had been working on a nonfiction book — a history of White House children — but lost interest in it,” she said in an interview in the 1990s. “I was with my agent one day, and I told him I had an idea for a mystery: ‘Murder in the White House.’ I don’t know where those words came from.”

“Murder in the White House,” about a corrupt secretary of state found strangled in the family quarters of the executive mansion, was published by Arbor House in 1980. The novel climbed onto the best-seller lists, was sold to the movies, became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection and was bought for $215,000 by Fawcett for paperback publication.

Other books in the series, issued at a rate of one a year, carry titles like “Murder on Capitol Hill,” “Murder in the Supreme Court,” “Murder at the Kennedy Center,” “Murder at the Smithsonian,” “Murder at the National Cathedral” and “Murder at the Watergate.”

New Mysteries on the Shelves (1)

From time to time, I walk downstairs to specifically look for the newest mysteries and I like to make note of the findings here. Here are two more.

Going alphabetically, Ellen Crosby's The Chardonnay Charade: a wine country mystery is the second of this series featuring Lucie Montgomery, a vineyard owner in Virginia. In this story, Lucie has her vineyard warmed by a chopper flight during a chilly May night and, unfortunately, a body is discovered near the fields.Controversial political candidate Georgia Greenwood is the dead woman and her husband--Lucie's friend and doctor, Ross--is the immediate suspect for the crime.

Determined to help Ross, Lucie investigates Georgia's death while Ross faces yet another crisis. As a Civil War buff, Ross appears to discover a letter proving that Confederate president Jefferson Davis did have prior knowledge of the upcoming (and successful) assassination attempt on President Abraham Lincoln. This news is simply jaw-dropping--particularly locally in this small Virginia town with Confederacy enthusiasts. The book is 256 pages.

Next, is Eliot Pattison's Prayer of the ragon featuring former Beijing investigator Shan Tao Yun. It is the fifth book of its series.

Currently, an exiled Chinese national, Yun resides in a secret monastery in the remote mountains of Tibet under the friendship of outlaw Buddist monks. He is summoned to a remote village to defend a comatose man from execution for two murders.
The accused man is--curiously--a Najavo Indian seeking ancestral ties between his people and the ancient Bon. As Yun and his two commrades investigate, they find additional deaths and a handfull of suspects. Pattison's book is 362 pages and includes a glossary of foreign language terms in the back.

A Buried Treasure in an old Newspaper--

I found a buried treasure in an old copy of the local freebie weekly newspaper Creative Loafing a few days ago. This issue was a great candidate for the recycle bin (I'd keep issue after issue if I'm not careful) but I found a worthwhile book column about a short story collection of the past year's best work. The Best American Mystery Stories 2007 is available now and according to the column it's a great collected work. Edited by Carl Hiaasen this edition (it is the 11th of the series to date), it offers 20 detective and crime stories (of which, the crime stories may even just be the threat of a crime). Included are the well-known and popular authors (i.e., Lawrence Block and James Lee Burke) along with the less well-known writers.

The column concludes with the observation for this volume that "there isn't a single clunker in the bunch, an impressive achievement for any literary juror." And as a reader, I'll gladly take those reading odds.