Symphonie Fantastique: March to the Gallows (1964), by Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly (1927) once appeared to have a very promising long-term career in crime writing, but she seems to have been largely forgotten by the reading public today, while her older "Crime Queen" predecessors from the Golden Age of detective fiction--Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh--have gone into new paperback edition after edition. Moreover, Kelly's own path-breaking modern Crime Queen contemporaries, the late P. D. James (1920-2014) and Ruth Rendell (1930-2015), remain very popular and other more traditionalist contemporaries of hers, like Patricia Moyes (1923-2000) and Catherine Aird (1930), remain in print today.

Without meaning to be disrespectful to this accomplished author, I'm not even certain that Mary Kelly is still living, although the few entries on her record no death date. (If living, she would be 87 or 88 today.) When one looks on the internet for information about her, one is more likely to find detail about Mary Jane Kelly (c. 1863-1888), widely believed to be the last of the victims of Jack the Ripper.  Why is Mary Kelly so much less remembered than some of her 'sixties contemporaries?

One answer seems to be that Mary Kelly simply stopped writing.  Her output of ten crime novels has been referred to as "small," but in actuality she was fairly productive in the period when she was active, 1956 to 1974, publishing a book of crime fiction about once every two years.  By comparison, in PD James's first two decades of crime fiction writing, 1962-1982, James published nine genre novels. James, however, kept writing, extending her crime writing career, launched when she was 42, to nearly a half-century's duration; and she also had the inestimable advantage of a long-running popular series detective, Adam Dalgliesh, who appeared in fourteen of her novels.

After an initial run of mystery novels (A Cold Coming, Dead Man's Riddle and The Christmas Egg) featuring a poshly-named series sleuth, Inspector Brett Nightingale, who came complete with an opera diva wife, Kelly in the 1960s abandoned classic series detective fiction in the traditional mode. In 1961 she published her most successful novel, The Spoilt Kill, which won the Gold Dagger from Britain's Crime Writers' Association and was reprinted more than any of her other novels (Penguin, 1964, Harper Perennial, 1982 and Virago, 1999).  Kill was hailed as a model of the new school of detective fiction, praised not only for the authenticity of its workplace setting (a pottery), but for its bleak mood and convincing presentation of emotional states. (Kill and its two immediate followers also are series detective novels of a sort, but in an odd way.)

During the rest of the decade Kelly followed Kill with Due to a Death (1961), reprinted as The Dead of Summer in the US; March to the Gallows (1964); Dead Corse (1966); and Write on Both Sides of the Paper (1969).  The latter three novels all were finalists for the CWA Gold Dagger, and Due to a Death and Dead Corse in the 'sixties both were reprinted in paperback in the UK by Penguin. (In the same decade Dead Corse was reprinted in paperback in the US by Avon.)

Two novels followed from Kelly in the 'seventies, The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1971) and That Girl in the Alley (1974), but these won the author less critical attention, and neither title was reprinted.

In the 'seventies Kelly also lost her American publisher, Holt, Rinehart, who after the success of The Spoilt Kill  had picked up her books and published three of her works to much acclaim as "Rinehart Suspense Novels." After Kelly retired from crime fiction writing at the age of 47, her reputation began to fade, so that her fame receded to the status (if that) of a one-hit wonder, as the author of The Spoilt Kill.

This is most unfortunate, as Kelly's body of work in the crime fiction genre is a distinguished one, with no less than six of her crime novels still standing, in my estimation, as fine examples of the crime writers' art.  The early Inspector Nightingale novels are more traditional works (the latter two in the series recommended by me), while the next four Kelly novels are prime examples of the more modern, angst-filled crime novel, with intricate plotting still present.

March to the Gallows is one of these later novels.  Its title is derived from Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, most particularly the symphony's March au supplice (March to the Scaffold/Gallows) movement. (A neighbor boy in the novel repeatedly plays a record of the symphony and there is a park area called the March that plays a major role in the novel).

Thou Shalt Not Emote
Barzun and Taylor's
A Catalogue of Crime
the Bible of detective
fiction orthodoxy

Traditionalists Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, who in their landmark mystery reference work A Catalogue of Crime deprecated the modern tendency to commingle the detective tale of entertainment and escape with the serious novel, were rather vexed by Mary Kelly's crime fiction.

Due to a Death they dismissed as a "tedious essay in self-torture" and they complained that The Spoilt Kill was, well, spoiled by Kelly's insistence "on laying bare each nerve of each character and playing a sinfonietta thereon."  Of March to the Gallows they complain that the protagonist, "a young woman librarian," is "ill and neurotic."

This kind of critical commentary says more about the cramped nature of Barzun and Taylor's view of the proper boundaries of the detective novel than it does about the quality of Kelly's work.

To be sure, Kelly's novel is very much in the modern mode.

Gallows's protagonist, Hester Callard, unquestionably is an embittered individual, still trying to recover from the sudden, accidental death of her late lover. Evidently to the phlegmatic Barzun and Taylor this understandable emotional state makes Hester "neurotic." Admittedly, the young woman has a sharp tongue and we frequently feel cuts from it in the novel, since she narrates the events.  She does so in a highly literate manner, with sharp observations and literary allusions. (If you didn't know who Lady Hester Stanhope was before you read this novel, you certainly will after you are done so.) I thought Kelly's writing was compelling, though Barzun and Taylor apparently did not consider that aspect of the book worth mentioning.

Hester has returned to her old family home on Colwell Street in Waterhall, part of the greater London metropolitan area, taking on a job in reference at the local public library. On Colwell Street she resides with her elderly father (Hester is 25, but her father was well into middle age when she was born) and her Uncle Percy and Aunt Norah.  The latter, a tartly outspoken but by no means unintelligent traditionalist, is a most engaging character, and I enjoyed following her exchanges with Hester.

This family made their money in--gasp!--trade, in contrast with their longtime genteel neighbors, the Leyburns, with whom Hester has always had an equivocal relationship. Not only are class relations a predominating concern of the novel, but race relations as well, with the rising presence of "Negroes" in London coming under scrutiny, as well as a nativist anti-immigrant backlash. The more things change....

Readers of the blog will know I just reviewed Agatha Christie's swinging 'sixties mystery, Third Girl, and I must say that while I didn't find Christie's portrayal of the mod era risible like some have, it was clear to me that Kelly, eight years younger than Christie's daughter, was much more familiar with these times than was the Golden Age Queen of Crime, as might well be expected.

Kelly's novel comes off very much more as character study and social observation, especially during the first half or more of the novel, when the crime problem, which we know surely must be there somewhere, is presented quite allusively.

There's the theft of Hester's handbag, in which she kept a memento from her dead lover (a medallion necklace she recently accidentally broke), and we hear briefly of a body discovered on the march, but just what exactly is going on around Hester is challenging for the reader to determine.  However, it all comes together beautifully at the end, when we discern the criminal design in what seemed a series of disconnected events.

Barzun and Taylor complain that there is "no detection" in the novel, by which they mean a formal investigative process; yet there are numerous clues provided to the reader and the plot elements dovetail beautifully. (One bit is classically Christie-esque.) Berlioz's symphony is nicely worked into it all as well. For once I defer to the publisher's jacket summary, which really does put it well (much better, in my view, than Barzun and Taylor):

This haunting, bittersweet love story of lost love and life brings to a culmination Mary Kelly's skill not only as a teller of tales but as a magnificent exponent of the detective story....March to the Gallows is a challenge to the reader who is delighted by puzzles and the discovery of human nature in all its aspects.

Deathtraps, Dream Bombs, Snow, Flakes, Third Girl: Third Girl (1966), by Agatha Christie (Christie in the Sixties)

Note: For non-American readers of this blog, or American readers under the age of, say, forty-five or so, the post title references the theme song to the That Girl television series (starring Marlo Thomas), which premiered the same year Agatha Christie's Third Girl was published.--TPT

"She's a third girl....It's the way girls like living now.  Better than P. G.'s or a hostel.  The main girl takes a furnished flat, and then shares out the rent.  Second girl is usually a friend.  Then they find a third by advertising, if they don't know one...."
                               --Ariadne Oliver in Third Girl (1966)

Third Girl traditionally has not been much esteemed by critics.  In his book Adventure, Mystery and Romance scholar John G. Cawelti cites Third Girl as an example of one of Christie "artistic failures," and Robert Barnard, in his generally quite favorable Christie monograph A Talent to Deceive, dismisses the novel as "one of Christie's most embarrassing attempts to haul herself abreast of the swinging sixties."  

More recently, however, Laura Thompson in her 2007 biography of Christie praises Third Girl, declaring that the sixties milieu is "utterly convincing." 

Where do I stand on this one?  When I first read Third Girl when I was about twelve or so I must admit I thought it was one of the "boring" Christies. I didn't pay much attention to publishing dates at the time, but I now realize that I thought most of the later Christies, from 1965 (At Bertram's Hotel) onward, were pretty boring.  Rereading some of them now, I am finding them of greater interest.

girls one and two

One thing that appealed to me about Third Girl is how this is a full-bore Poirot mystery, something that was an increasing rarity after the mid-fifties, when Hickory, Dickory Dock and Dead Man's Folly were published. Between 1957 and 1975, a nearly twenty-year period, only six Poirot detective novels appeared: Cat among the Pigeons (1959), The Clocks (1963), Third Girl (1966), Hallowe'en Party (1969), Elephants Can Remember (1972) and Curtain (1975).

Of these novels, the last title was actually written by Christie during the Second World War, and Poirot plays a recessive role in both Cat and Clocks. In both of those latter novels I believe he is mostly is occupied with writing a book on detective fiction, which he has finally finished in Third Girl.

When Hercule Poirot popped up in Third Girl, it was his first fully active performance since Dead Man's Folly was published a decade earlier. Contemporary reviews of the novel, Cawelti and Barnard notwithstanding, were favorable.  

For example, while Anthony Boucher thought the plot "only moderately good Christie," he lavished praise on Poirot and his mystery writer sidekick Ariadne Oliver and the author's "acute sense of the immediate contemporary scene."

the third girl

I think one can appreciate why critics were positive: it's nice to have Poirot back in a truly active capacity, even if he does rely extensively on subordinate investigations by a Mr. Goby, who appears on occasion in Poirot novels. 

The brilliant Belgian sleuth is fully in his environment, with manservant George, the ever-efficient Miss Lemon, endearingly scatty Mrs. Oliver, his magnificent vanity and moral force, his tisane, his sirop de cassis, his chocolate, his mustaches, etc.--it's a warm bath of authentic Christie nostalgia, something I most definitely missed in Sophie Hannah's ballyhooed Poirot continuation novel, The Monogram Murders.

And Christie has worked up a good "situation" for Third Girl. When the distraught young "third girl" of the title, Norma Restarick, barges into Poirot's flat, telling him she thinks she "might have committed a murder" before abruptly departing, declaring that Poirot is just "too old" to be of help to her (the generation gap rearing its head), it's a set-up that immediately entices the reader.

Marlo Thomas, aka "That Girl"

The plot itself employs time-tested Christie devices and deceptions in an enjoyable manner, if not quite as smoothly as in the past. Aspects of the plot, though clever, take a bit of swallowing and the resolution of two of the characters' fates felt rather forced.

While there are not actually all that many scenes devoted to swinging sixties London in Third Girl, I did not find Christie's portrayal of this milieu "ridiculous" like Robert Barnard did. To be sure, Christie does drop drug references with wild abandon: Purple Hearts, Dream Bombs, coke, snow, hash, etc.  It's raining meth, you might say. 

In fact, I thought David Baker, the modster artist character described by Christie as "a young man with lavish chestnut hair curled on his shoulders, wearing a red velvet waistcoast and a very fancy jacket" and nicknamed "the Peacock" by Mrs. Oliver, actually was the most interesting new character in the novel. Over the years he has inspired much of the cover art for Third Girl.

The basic idea of the "third girl" works beautifully, I think, Christie having alertly caught onto and cleverly employed a phenomenon of modern English life. (It's a shame the television adaptation moved the time period back to the Thirties.)  

I was fascinated with Borodene Mansions, the London block of flats where the three girls live, which Christie likens in appearance to the prison Wormwood Scrubs; and I noted the harlequin wallpaper in their flat, captured on the Pocket paperback cover illustrated above. Christie was always fascinated by the Harlequin motif.

All in all, Third Girl is a worthy addition to the Poirot canon. If the novel doesn't make it to home base, it certainly hits a double, or, dare I say...a triple?

not Borodene Mansions

Postscript: In Third Girl there's a marvelous instance of the "odd" English terms to which Christie books used to introduce me, a young American reader.  Mrs. Oliver, in one of the novel's unlikely coincidences, happens upon Norma Restarick and David Baker in a cafe called The Merry Shamrock. The two are eating beans and toast, which always sounded singularly unappealing to me as a lad.  Is it really as simple as canned baked beans on toast with Worcestershire sauce on top?  I'm afraid my reaction, if actually presented with this dish, might be rather like that of these Americans:

Americans try Beans on Toast (Caution: Humor!)

This recipe, now, looks pretty good!

British-style Beans on Toast

The Tuesday Night Bloggers

In a nod to Agatha Christie's classic book of Miss Marple short stories, The  Thirteen Problems (aka The Tuesday Club Murders in the US), in which Miss Marple herself as well as other individuals swap stories about real-life mysteries, some of us in the mystery blogging community have formed

The Tuesday Night Bloggers

a group dedicated to discussing aspects of all things Agatha.

Here are the links to some very original and interesting pieces by our club members (I have one too, on the way):

Bev Hankins, Murder on the Orient Express: Review and Audio-Visual Extravaganza
Brad Friedman, The Bloodstained Pavement, Part I: Agatha Christie and the Serial Killer
Curtis Evans, Deathtraps, Dream Bombs, Snow, Flakes, Third Girl
Helen Szamuely, The Mystery of Raymond West
Jeffrey Marks, He Must be Belgian!
Moira Redmond, An Agatha Christie List
Noah Stewart, Christie's Rarest Paperback Editions

Ray and Jimmy: The Raymond Chandler-James M. Fox Correspondence, Part 2

Sometimes I get distracted with other jobs and don't continue a blog post series in what you might call a timely fashion.  In this case, it's been nearly two years!  Back in December 2013, I started writing about the correspondence between Raymond Chandler and a much lesser-known hard-boiled (sometimes medium-boiled) writer, James M. Fox. (See my admittedly rather tepid review of his novel The Gentle Hangman.)  The correspondence sheds revealing light on attitudes toward the crime fiction craft by two mid-twentieth-century practitioners of it, one of them one of the mystery genre's most important figures.

James M. Fox

When I left off, Fox, in a letter from 3 March 1953, had just informed Chandler that he had, at Chandler's suggestion, started writing a spy novel, nearly completed, which he wanted to dedicate to the older author: The basic format is not unlike that of [Somerset Maugham's] Ashenden, although I can hardly hope even to approximate Maugham's craftsmanship and general excellence.

Chandler replied that "I should be only too flattered at the idea of having one of your books dedicated to me," adding that "I have read quite a few spy stories (I mean recent ones, written since the war) but I can't say that I have read anything that impressed me much."

Although he admired crime writer Dorothy B. Hughes "very much," he wasn't impressed with her recent espionage novel, The Davidian Report.

"It may be that there is something self-defeating in the spy story itself and that intelligence or counter-intelligence work in fiction is ether damned dull stuff  or so oversimplified that it becomes silly," he ruminated.  "The same thing could probably be said about police work, and perhaps this is why so few mysteries of any quality (when I say so few, I can't offhand think of any) are written around actual police detectives, or to be more accurate I should say police detectives who might conceivably actually be policemen."

In his response Fox noted that he was about to publish a new novel, Code Three, the first in a new series, with a police sergeant protagonist. "The publisher likes it, which means very little, of course" he noted bluntly. "It will probably sell all right because of the sex plus violence element in it, and because it contains at least a flavor of actual police work, but the word 'quality' is one I hardly expect to hear mentioned in connection with it."  [In the event critic Anthony Boucher found the material in the novel over-familiar, but declared that "it reads at such a terrific clip, with such economy and vividness, that your reservations come only after you've finished it."]

On 8 January 1954 Fox sent Chandler a copy of his completed spy novel, Dark Crusade, and three weeks later Chandler replied, bestowing considerable praise on the book, though not without some qualification:

I liked the book so much that I wish I had three more just like it to look forward to....I like the cool literate way in which you write.  I think some of your stuff will go over the heads of the lending library creeps, but that can't be helped....What the story lacks is a central drive.  I'm talking, please understand, in terms of popular support....As for comparisons your stuff makes most of the so-called spy novels seem pretty fantastic [i.e., unbelievable].  I'm not thinking of a terrible piece of rubbish like Little Red Monkey (which is practically G. A. Henty) but rather of competent writing jobs such as The Davidian Report or [Julian Symons'] The Broken Penny.  Neither sounds in the least as if the author knew anything about intelligence or C. I. work  Of course there is always a danger in knowing too much.  You forget to simplify.  I don't think you did, not for me anyhow, but I do think the book might have had a possibly better sale if the central story line had been simpler and more emotional.

Chandler's view of Stalin
was rather different from
that advanced in this
propaganda poster

Occasioned by his reading of Dark Crusade, Chandler went on to express his views of the Cold War, as well as, incidentally, the American Civil War, by my reading denouncing the United States for not sufficiently resisting the Soviet Union and avowing support for the Lost Cause:

I don't suppose the people of this country will ever let themselves realise how much harm to themselves and their future their foreign policy has done.  The principle of self-determination seems to work everywhere in other people's colonies, unless of course it is a question of placating some swine like Stalin, when you toss whole nations into the incinerator without a qualm. The only domestic problem of self-determination we have faced was in the War Between the States (in which I should most certainly have fought on the losing side). It was also almost the first demonstration of high-powered propaganda in convincing the world that the war was about slavery, which it was not. The nation, said Lincoln, cannot exist half slave and half free, but apparently we think the world can. So much for that.

Chandler sent a copy of this English edition
to his friend Fox

Chandler also noted that his new Philip Marlowe novel, The Long Goodbye, had sold close to 30, 000 copies in the UK, adding "I only wish American sales could compare. Adjusted for population that would mean a real sale here." He promised he would send Fox a copy of the book, which the next year would win the Edgar for best mystery novel.

In his reply Fox expressed dissatisfaction with Dark Crusade, explaining that he had to draw on pre-1939 memories of Europe and had been allowed only six months to complete the book: "This sort of writing really shouldn't even be attempted without at least 50, 000 words in background notes, made on location within the past year or so."

Fox ruefully admitted to Chandler that

The question of compromise between cool fact and emotion is one that has always bothered me, badly.  I realize full well that the average reader craves emotional experience, yet it is very difficult for me to supply anything of the sort.  My instinctive tendency is to supply only "facts," whether fictitious or not; to place them in studied relationship to each other, preferably ironical relationship; and to demand that the reader understand thoroughly, grasp the meaning, perform the often necessary doubeltake and work up his own emotional reaction.  This procedure is against the rules, I know, and sells no books.

the average American's idea of "Dutch"?

Fox noted that he was planning a trip to Europe and he hoped to write another espionage novel set there. However, he feared that financial considerations would force  him "to stick to routine bread and butter stuff for quite awhile. Right now I'm on one of those three-and-four-letter word, six-word sentence, cops and gangsters stories for which the reprint publishers are yammering."

In the hope of facilitating his book sales Fox was now advising publishers in publicity material "not to emphasize my Dutch origins."  He wryly explained that the "average American reader tends to associate the adjective Dutch only with cheese, wooden shoes and little boys plugging holes in dykes with their thumbs."

Chandler, who now was calling his correspondent simply "Fox" (rather than "Mr. Fox") urged in his next letter, "Cut out the 'mister' please."  Later in the year the two would advance, in term of their epistolary intimacy, to calling each other "Ray" and "Jimmy." More to come soon, I hope!

The Big Five from the Bottom Shelf: The Most Popular of the Least Popular Christies; Plus, The Tuesday Night Bloggers!

Miss Marple solves a mystery and
battles Fifties juvenile delinquency

In my last post on the Great Christie Lists Compilation, I gave the eighteen bottom-ranking Christies, the ones no one put on a list of favorites, and asked people, here and on Facebook, to tell me their favorites--their "Big Four," if you will--from this less favored bunch.

Well here are the results.  It's a "Big Five," actually:

First Place (TIE, with six votes each)
Lord Edgware Dies and The Seven Dials Mystery

Second Place (TIE, with four votes each)
At Bertram's Hotel, Cat among the Pigeons and They Do It with Mirrors

Congratulations to the Big Five from the Bottom Third!

Getting two votes apiece were:

Sacre bleu!
By the looks on their faces clearly
Poirot has received the shocking
news about Murder on the
Links, Hallowe'en Party and 
Elephants Can Remember

The Clocks, Dead Man's Folly, Dumb Witness, The Man in the Brown Suit, The Mystery of the Blue Train and Third Girl

Getting one vote apiece were:

The Big Four itself, They Came to Baghdad and Postern of Fate

That leaves four titles for which no one voted. Evidently, there's just no love for this Wee Four:

The Murder on the Links
Hallowe'en Party
Passenger to Frankfurt
Elephants Can Remember

Hallowe'en Party isn't that bad, I think, and The Murder on the Links has good points in my view, though I must admit it has never really grabbed me.

Passenger and Elephants--well, what can you say? These do come in for a lot of criticism. I'm just surprised Postern escaped the same fate! Lucy R. Fisher has made an interesting case for it, though.

It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings!

Thanks to everyone who participated!

And now I want to announce the formation of The Tuesday Night Bloggers: an international blogging "club" comprised of myself, Bev Hankins, Brad Friedman, Helen Szamuely, Jeffrey Marks Moira Redmond and Noah Stewart.

Each of us will do a Christie-related post every Tuesday night for the next six weeks (or so the theory goes).

I will post links to everyone's pieces here, so make sure you tune in on Tuesday and see what's being discussed!

And, yes, if this format reminds you of a certain Christie book, you may just be on to something!

Also, any other bloggers who may want to participate in the club, just let me know.

The Christies That Didn't Make the Cut

Eighteen Agatha Christie mystery novels did not receive any mention on the 31 Favorite Christie lists I recently compiled. Here are the unloved (comparatively) Christie mysteries:

Seven Dials Mystery: clocked out

From the Twenties
The Murder on the Links (1923)
The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)
The Big Four (1927)
The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)
The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)

From the Thirties
Lord Edgware Dies (1933)
Dumb Witness (1937)

From the Fifties
They Came to Baghdad (1951)
They Do It with Mirrors (1952)
Dead Man's Folly (1956)
Cat among the Pigeons (1959)

From the Sixties
The Clocks (1963)
At Bertram's Hotel (1965)
Third Girl (1966)
Hallowe'en Party (1969)

From the Seventies
Passenger to Frankfurt (1970)
Elephants Can Remember (1972)
Postern of Fate (1973)

Let's give these uncosseted Christies another chance!  If you had to pick your favorites--let's say your Big Four--from this bunch, what would they be?  I'm sure Lord Edgware is dying to know!

Favorite Christie Novels: Runners-Up

Here are the eighteen Christie novels in the recent lists compilation I did that didn't make the Top 20, but nevertheless made more than one list:

On Four Lists:
Hickory, Dickory, Dock
Murder Is Easy
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Ordeal by Innocence
Sleeping Murder
Towards Zero

On Three Lists:
Death Comes as the End
Mrs. McGinty's Dead
Peril at End House
Sad Cypress
Murder in Three Acts (Three Act Tragedy)

One Two Lists:
Death in the Clouds
Destination Unknown
The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side
Nemesis
The Secret Adversary
Sparkling Cyanide
Taken at the Flood

The play The Mousetrap also got multiple mentions, as well as the short story collections The Labours of Hercules and The Mysterious Mr. Quin.

Poirot wasn't quite as dominant here as he was on the Top 20 list, accounting for eight of the titles. Miss Marple accounted for three, Tommy and Tuppence one, and six were non-series.

searching for favorite Christies

The ten Christie titles that received only single mentions on the lists were:

Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
The Secret of Chimneys
Appointment with Death
Murder in Mesopotamia
The Sittaford Mystery
N or M?
A Pocket Full of Rye
A Caribbean Mystery
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
The Pale Horse (that would be my list)

Poirot was only in two of these, Miss Marple two, Tommy and Tuppence two and the remaining four were non-series.

The plays The Patient and The Witness for the Prosecution showed up too.

So, 48 novels were mentioned on at least one list.  That's a bit over two-thirds of her crime novels. Next time I will look at the twenty novels that made nobody's list!