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Sherlock Holmes, pipe-puffing hero of crime fiction, confers with his colleague Dr. Watson; together these characters popularized the genre.

Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalises crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred. It has several sub-genres, including detective fiction (such as the whodunnit), legal thriller, courtroom drama and hard-boiled fiction.

History of crime fictions[link]

While the archetype for a murder mystery dates back to "The Three Apples" in the One Thousand and One Nights,^[1] crime fiction began to be considered as a serious genre only around 1900. The earliest known crime novel is "The Rector of Veilbye" by the Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829. Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe (e.g., "The Murders in the Rue Morgue " (1841), " The Mystery of Marie Roget " (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844). Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone (1868) is often thought to be his masterpiece. French author Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1868) laid the groundwork for the methodical, scientifically minded detective. The evolution of locked room mysteries was one of the landmarks in the history of crime fiction. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Arthur Conan Doyle are said to have been singularly responsible for the huge popularity in this genre. A precursor was Paul Féval, whose series Les Habits Noirs (1862–67) features Scotland Yard detectives and criminal conspiracies.

The evolution of the print mass media in the United Kingdom and the United States in the latter half of the 19th century was crucial in popularising crime fiction and related genres. Literary 'variety' magazines like Strand, McClure's, and Harper's quickly became central to the overall structure and function of popular fiction in society, providing a mass-produced medium that offered cheap, illustrated publications that were essentially disposable.

Like the works of many other important fiction writers of his day—e.g. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens—Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in serial form in the monthly Strand magazine in the United Kingdom. The series quickly attracted a wide and passionate following on both sides of the Atlantic, and when Doyle killed off Holmes in The Final Problem, the public outcry was so great, and the publishing offers for more stories so attractive, that he was reluctantly forced to resurrect him.

Later a set of stereotypic formulae began to appear to cater to various tastes.

Categories of crime fiction[link]

Crime fiction can be divided into the following branches:

Detective fiction[link]

• The whodunit: The most common form of detective fiction. It features a complex, plot-driven story in which the reader is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced before the solution is revealed at the end of the book.
• Locked room mystery: A specialized kind of a whodunit in which the crime is committed under apparently impossible circumstances, such as a locked room in which no intruder could have entered or left.
• Cozy: A subgenre of detective fiction in which sex, profanity or violence are downplayed or treated humorously.

Later and contemporary contributions to the whodunit[link]

• The historical whodunnit: Also a sub-genre of historical fiction. The setting of the story and the crime has some historical significance
• The inverted detective story: Also known as "howcatchem", the commission of the crime and the identity of the perpetrator is revealed to the reader first, then the rest of the story describes the detective's attempt to solve the mystery.
• The American hard-boiled school: Distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex, the sleuth usually also confronts danger and engages in violence.
• The police procedural: The detective is a member of the police, and thus the activities of a police force are usually convincingly depicted.
• The legal thriller: The major characters are instead lawyers and their employees, and they become involved in proving their cases.
• The spy novel: The major characters are instead spies, usually working for an intelligence agency.
• Caper stories and the criminal novel: Stories told from the point of view of the criminals.
• The psychological suspense: This specific sub-genre of the thriller genre also incorporates elements from detective fiction, as the protagonist must solve the mystery of the psychological conflict presented in these types of stories.
• Spoofs and parodies

Crime fiction and mainstream fiction[link]

When trying to pigeon-hole fiction, it is extraordinarily difficult to tell where crime fiction starts and where it ends. This is largely attributed to the fact that love, danger and death are central motifs in fiction. A less obvious reason is that the classification of a work may very well be related to the author's reputation.

For example, William Somerset Maugham's (1874–1966) novella Up at the Villa (1941) could very well be classified as crime fiction. This short novel revolves around a woman having a one-night stand with a total stranger who suddenly and unexpectedly commits suicide in her bedroom, and the woman's attempts at disposing of the body so as not to cause a scandal about herself or be suspected of killing the man. As Maugham is not usually rated as a writer of crime novels, Up at the Villa is hardly ever considered to be a crime novel and accordingly can be found in bookshops among his other, "mainstream" novels.

A more recent example is Bret Easton Ellis's (born 1964) seminal novel American Psycho (1991) about the double life of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie and serial killer in the New York of the 1980s. Even though in American Psycho the most heinous crimes are depicted in minute detail, the novel has never been labelled a "crime novel", maybe because it is never explicitly mentioned whether Bateman actually commits the crimes or rather just fantasizes about them.

On the other hand, U.S. author James M. Cain is normally seen as a writer belonging to the "hard-boiled" school of crime fiction. However, his novel Mildred Pierce (1941) is really about the rise to success of an ordinary housewife developing her entrepreneurial skills and—legally—outsmarting her business rivals, and the domestic trouble caused by her success, with, in turn, her husband, her daughter and her lover turning against her. Although no crime is committed anywhere in the book, the novel was reprinted in 1989 by Random House, alongside Cain's thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), under the heading "Vintage Crime".

When film director Michael Curtiz adapted Mildred Pierce for the big screen in 1945, he lived up to the cinemagoers' and the producers' expectations by adding a murder that is not in the novel. As potential cinemagoers had been associating Cain with hard-boiled crime fiction only, this trick—exploited in advertisements and trailers—in combination with the casting of then Hollywood star Joan Crawford in the title role made sure that the film was going to be a box office hit even before it was released.

Seen from a practical point of view, one could argue that a crime novel is simply a novel that can be found in a bookshop on the shelf or shelves labelled "Crime". (This suggestion has actually been made about science fiction, but it can be applied here as well.) Penguin Books have had a long-standing tradition of publishing crime novels in paperback editions with green covers and spines (as opposed to the orange spines of mainstream literature), thus attracting the eyes of potential buyers already when they enter the shop. But again, this clever marketing strategy does not tell casual browsers what they are really in for when they buy a particular book.

"High art" versus "popular art"[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The discrepancy between taste and acclaim[link]

Up to the 1960s or so, reading the paperback edition of a crime novel was usually considered a cheap thrill — with the word "cheap" used in both meanings: "inexpensive" and "of minor quality". The educated and civilized world was often interested, at least ostensibly, in the "high art" categorised by classical music, paintings by renowned artists, famous literature and plays like those of William Shakespeare. The term "popular art" referred to folk music, jazz, or rock 'n' roll, photography, the design of everyday objects, comics, science fiction, detective stories or erotic fiction (the latter circulating in private prints only to beat the censor), to quote a few examples. The idea of a "main stream" of literary output suggested that any book deviating, in either content or form or both, from the established norm of "high art" was "cheap", and anyone interested in popular culture was uneducated and unsophisticated and most probably originated in a lower socio-economic division of the contextual society. The universities and the other institutions of higher learning also looked down on artists producing "popular art" and categorically refused to critically assess it.

This often did not correlate with the immense popularity of popular art on both sides of the Atlantic, sometimes due to sensationalism. For example, the British had been fascinated by Edgar Wallace's (1875–1932) crime novels ever since the author set up a competition offering a reward to any reader who could figure out and describe just how the murder in his first book, The Four Just Men (1906), was committed.

A reassessment of critical ideals[link]

In the long run, the vast output of popular fiction could no longer be ignored, and literary critics — gradually, carefully and tentatively — started questioning and assessing the complete notion of the perceived gap between "high art" (or "serious literature") and "popular art" (in America often referred to as "pulp fiction", often verging on "smut and filth"). One of the first scholars to do so was American critic Leslie Fiedler. In his book Cross the Border — Close the Gap (1972), he advocates a thorough re-assessment of science fiction, the western, pornographic literature and all the other subgenres that previously had not been considered as "high art", and their inclusion in the literary canon:

The notion of one art for the 'cultural,' i.e., the favored few in any given society and of another subart for the 'uncultured,' i.e., an excluded majority as deficient in Gutenberg skills as they are untutored in 'taste,' in fact represents the last survival in mass industrial societies (capitalist, socialist, communist — it makes no difference in this regard) of an invidious distinction proper only to a class-structured community. Precisely because it carries on, as it has carried on ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, a war against that anachronistic survival, Pop Art is, whatever its overt politics, subversive: a threat to all hierarchies insofar as it is hostile to order and ordering in its own realm. What the final intrusion of Pop into the citadels of High Art provides, therefore, for the critic is the exhilarating new possibility of making judgments about the 'goodness' and 'badness' of art quite separated from distinctions between 'high' and 'low' with their concealed class bias.

In other words, it was now up to the literary critics to devise criteria with which they would then be able to assess any new literature along the lines of "good" or "bad" rather than "high" versus "popular".

Accordingly,

• A conventionally written and dull novel about, say, a "fallen woman" could be ranked lower than a terrifying vision of the future full of action and suspense.
• A story about industrial relations in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century — a novel about shocking working conditions, trade unionists, strikers and scabs — need not be more acceptable subject-matter per se than a well-crafted and fast-paced thriller about modern life.

But, according to Fiedler, it was also up to the critics to reassess already existing literature. In the case of U.S. crime fiction, writers that so far had been regarded as the authors of nothing but "pulp fiction" — Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and others — were gradually seen in a new light. Today, Chandler's creation, private eye Philip Marlowe — who appears, for example, in his novels The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940) — has achieved cult status and has also been made the topic of literary seminars at universities round the world, whereas on first publication Chandler's novels were seen as little more than cheap entertainment for the uneducated masses.

Nonetheless, "murder stories" such as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment or Shakespeare's Macbeth are not dependent on their honorary membership in this genre for their acclaim.

Pseudonymous authors[link]

As far as the history of crime fiction is concerned, some authors have been reluctant to publish their crime novels under their real names. More currently, some publish pseudonymously because of the belief that since the large booksellers are aware of their historical sales figures, and command a certain degree of influence over publishers, the only way to "break out" of their current advance numbers is to publish as someone with no track record.

In the late 1930s and 40s, British County Court judge Arthur Alexander Gordon Clark (1900–1958) published a number of detective novels under the alias Cyril Hare in which he made use of his profoundly extensive knowledge of the English legal system. In Tragedy at Law (1942). Scottish journalist Leopold Horace Ognall (1908–1979) authored over ninety novels as Hartley Howard and Harry Carmichael. When he was still young and unknown, award-winning British novelist Julian Barnes (born 1946) published some crime novels under the alias Dan Kavanagh. Other authors take delight in cherishing their alter egos: Ruth Rendell (born 1930) writes one sort of crime novels as Ruth Rendell and another type as Barbara Vine; John Dickson Carr also used the pseudonym Carter Dickson. The author Evan Hunter (which itself was a pseudonym) wrote his crime fiction under the name of Ed McBain.

Film and literature: The case of crime fiction[link]

Crime fiction and the motion picture industry have complemented each other well over the years. Both cater to the need of the average audience to escape into an idealist world, where the good reaps the rewards, and the bad incur their punishment. Adaptations of crime fiction into films have been hugely successful.

For a detailed explication of the history of the relationship between crime fiction and the film industry, see the main article crime film and mystery film.

Crime fiction has also expanded to the world of videogames, an example being the Ace Attorney series, in which players investigate a murder in order to prove a suspect innocent and find the true culprit.

Availability of crime novels[link]

Quality and availability[link]

As with any other entity, quality of a crime fiction book is not in any meaningful proportion to its availability. Some of the crime novels generally regarded as the finest, including those regularly chosen by experts as belonging to the best 100 crime novels ever written (see bibliography), have been out of print ever since their first publication, which often dates back to the 1920s or 30s. The bulk of books that can be found today on the shelves labelled "Crime" consists of recent first publications usually no older than a few years.

Classics and bestsellers[link]

Furthermore, only a select few authors have achieved the status of "classics" for their published works. A classic is any text that can be received and accepted universally, because they transcend context. A popular, well known example is Agatha Christie, whose texts, originally published between 1920 and her death in 1976, are available in UK and US editions in all English speaking nations. Christie's works, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre. Her most famous novels include Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), and the world's best-selling mystery And Then There Were None (1939).^[2]

Other less successful, contemporary authors who are still writing have seen reprints of their earlier works, due to current overwhelming popularity of crime fiction texts among audiences (One only has to look at the amount of crime related television series to observe the astonishing popularity). One example is Val McDermid, whose first book appeared as far back as 1987; another is Florida-based author Carl Hiaasen, who has been publishing books since 1981, all of which are readily available.

Forgotten classics[link]

On the other hand, English crime writer Edgar Wallace, who was immensely popular with the English readership during the early decades of the 20th century (and who achieved fame in German-speaking countries due to the many B movies made in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that were based on his novels), had almost been forgotten in his home country until House of Stratus eventually started republishing many of his 170 books around the turn of the millennium. Similarly, the books by the equally successful American author Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970), creator of the lawyer Perry Mason, which have frequently been adapted for film, radio, and TV, were only recently republished in the United Kingdom — books such as The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), etc.

Even television adaptations are not enough to save some authors. Gladys Mitchell rivalled Agatha Christie for UK sales in the 1930s and 1940s but only one of her 66 novels remains in print despite a BBC television series of the The Mrs Bradley Mysteries in 1999.

Revival of past classics[link]

From time to time publishing houses decide, for commercial purposes, to revive long-forgotten authors and reprint one or two of their more commercially successful novels. Apart from Penguin Books, who for this purpose have resorted to their old green cover and dug out some of their vintage authors, Pan started a series in 1999 entitled "Pan Classic Crime," which includes a handful of novels by Eric Ambler, but also American Hillary Waugh's Last Seen Wearing .... In 2000, Edinburgh-based Canongate Books started a series called "Canongate Crime Classics," in which they published John Franklin Bardin's The Deadly Percheron (1946) — both a whodunnit and a roman noir about amnesia and insanity — and other novels. However, books brought out by smaller publishers like Canongate Books are usually not stocked by the larger bookshops and overseas booksellers.

Sometimes older crime novels are revived by screenwriters and directors rather than publishing houses. In many such cases, publishers then follow suit and release a so-called "film tie-in" edition showing a still from the movie on the front cover and the film credits on the back cover of the book — yet another marketing strategy aimed at those cinemagoers who may want to do both: first read the book and then watch the film (or vice versa). Recent examples include Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (originally published in 1955), Ira Levin's Sliver (1991), with the cover photograph depicting a steamy sex scene between Sharon Stone and William Baldwin straight from the 1993 movie, and, again, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC on the other hand have launched what they call "Bloomsbury Film Classics" — a series of original novels on which feature films were based. This series includes, for example, Ethel Lina White's novel The Wheel Spins (1936), which Alfred Hitchcock — before he went to Hollywood — turned into a much-loved movie entitled The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Ira Levin's (born 1929) science fiction thriller The Boys from Brazil (1976), which was filmed in 1978.

Older novels can often be retrieved from the ever-growing Project Gutenberg database.

See also[link]

Novels portal

• The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time
• Detective fiction
• Murder mystery game
• Mystery fiction
• Mystery film
• List of crime writers
• List of female detective characters
• Whodunit
• Hardboiled
• Art theft
• Crime Writers' Association
• Crime comics
• Giallo

References[link]

• Binyon, T J: "Murder Will Out". The Detective in Fiction (Oxford, 1990, ISBN 0-19-282730-8)
• The Crown Crime Companion. The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time Selected by the Mystery Writers of America, annotated by Otto Penzler, compiled by Mickey Friedman (New York, 1995, ISBN 0-517-88115-2)
• De Andrea, William L: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television (New York, 1994, ISBN 0-02-861678-2)
• Duncan, Paul: Film Noir. Films of Trust and Betrayal (Harpenden, 2000, ISBN 1-903047-08-0)
• The Hatchards Crime Companion. 100 Top Crime Novels Selected by the Crime Writers' Association, ed. Susan Moody (London, 1990, ISBN 0-904030-02-4)
• Hitt, Jim: Words and Shadows. Literature on the Screen (New York, 1992, ISBN 0-8065-1340-3)
• Mann, Jessica: Deadlier Than the Male (David & Charles, 1981. Macmillan,N.Y, 1981)
• McLeish, Kenneth and McLeish, Valerie: Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Murder. Crime Fiction and Thrillers (London, 1990, ISBN 0-13-359092-5)
• Ousby, Ian: The Crime and Mystery Book. A Reader's Companion (London, 1997).
• Symons, Julian: Bloody Murder. From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (Harmondsworth, 1974).
• Waterstone's Guide to Crime Fiction, ed. Nick Rennison and Richard Shephard (Brentford, 1997).
• Willett, Ralph: The Naked City. Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (Manchester, 1996).
• Classic Crime Fiction

External links[link]

• World's Best Detective, Crime, and Murder Mystery Books

Michael Robotham (born November 1960) is an Australian crime fiction writer.

Formerly a journalist with the Fairfax Press in Sydney he travelled to London and got a job on Fleet Street in 1986. He later became the best-selling pseudonymous author of ten "autobiographies" of people in the arts, Military and sport. He returned to Australia with his family in 1996 and took to writing full-time.

Awards and nominations[link]

• Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing, Best Novel, 2005: winner for Lost
• Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing, Best Novel, 2007: shortlisted for The Night Ferry
• Crime Writers' Association (UK), The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, 2007: shortlisted for The Night Ferry
• Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing, Best Novel, 2008: winner for Shatter
• Crime Writers' Association (UK), The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, Best Thriller, 2008: shortlisted for Shatter

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

• The Suspect (2004) ISBN 978-0-7515-4417-6
• Lost (2005) (aka The Drowning Man) ISBN 978-0-7515-4422-0
• The Night Ferry (2007)
• Shatter (2008) ISBN 978-0-7515-3731-4
• Bombproof (2008) ISBN 978-0-7515-4204-2
• Bleed For Me (2010) ISBN 978-0-7515-4109-0
• The Wreckage (2011) ISBN 978-1-84744-220-8

Interviews[link]

• "Shots ezine" [1] 2003
• "The Advertiser" [2] June 26, 2007
• "The Age" [3] August 19, 2007
• "reviewingtheevidence" [4] Undated, possibly end 2007
• "The Book Show" - discussion with Peter Temple [5] July 25, 2008

References[link]

• Author's official website

This article about an Australian writer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Ken Bruen (born 1951) is an Irish writer of hard-boiled and noir crime fiction.

He was born in Galway,^[1] and educated at Gormanston College, County Meath and later at Trinity College Dublin, where he earned a Ph.D. in metaphysics. He spent twenty-five years as an English teacher in Africa, Japan, S.E. Asia and South America.^[1] His travels have been hazardous at times, including a stint in a Brazilian jail.

Bruen is part of a literary circle that includes Jason Starr, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Allan Guthrie.

Bruen's works include the well-received White Trilogy and the Shamus Award-winning The Guards. In 2006, Hard Case Crime released Bust, a collaboration between Bruen and New York crime author Jason Starr. Bruen's short story "Words Are Cheap" (2006) appears in the first issue of Murdaland. He has also edited an anthology of stories set in Dublin, Dublin Noir.

Other works of note include The Killing of the Tinkers, The Magdalen Martyrs, The Dramatist and Priest (nominated for the 2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category "Best Novel"), all part of his Jack Taylor series, which began with The Guards. Bruen is also the recipient of the first David Loeb Goodis Award (2008) for his dedication to his art. Set in Galway, the acclaimed series relates the adventures and misadventures of a disgraced former police officer working as a haphazard private investigator whose life has been marred by alcoholism and drug abuse. It chronicles the social change in Ireland in Bruen's own lifetime, paying particular attention to the decline of the Catholic Church as a social and political power. Themes also explored include Ireland's economic prosperity from the mid 1990s onwards, although it is often portrayed as a force which has left Ireland as a materialistic and spiritually drained society which still harbours deep social inequality. This is the side of the Celtic Tiger best portrayed in Bruen's Ireland-based novels. Immigration is also a theme to be found in these works.

He lives in Galway, Ireland. He is married and has a daughter.

Bibliography[link]

Non-Series

• Shades of Grace (1993)
• Martyrs (1994)
• Rilke on Black (1996)
• The Hackman Blues (1997)
• Her Last Call to Louis MacNeice (1998)
• London Boulevard (2001)
• Dispatching Baudelaire (2004)
• American Skin (2006)
• Once Were Cops (2008)
• Killer Year (2008)

Jack Taylor

• The Guards (2001) - 2004 Shamus Award for Best Novel; Finalist 2004 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel; Finalist 2004 Macavity Award for Best Novel
• The Killing of the Tinkers (2002) - 2005 Macavity Award for Best Novel; Finalist 2005 Anthony Award for Best Novel
• The Magdalen Martyrs (2003)
• The Dramatist (2004) - 2007 Shamus Award for Best Novel
• Priest (2006) - 2007 Barry Award for Best British Novel; Finalist 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel
• Cross (2007)
• Sanctuary (2008)
• The Devil (2010)
• Headstone (2011)

Detective Sergeant Tom Brant and Chief Inspector James Roberts

• A White Arrest (1998)
• Taming the Alien (1999)
• The McDead (2000)
• Blitz (2002)
• Vixen (2003)
• Calibre (2006)
• Ammunition (2007)

Max Fisher and Angela Petrakos

• Bust (2006) - Finalist 2007 Barry Award for Best Paperback
• Slide (2007) - Finalist 2008 Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original^[2]
• The Max (2008)

Further reading[link]

Murphy, Paula. "'Murderous Mayhem': Ken Bruen and the New Ireland." CLUES: A Journal of Detection 24.2 (Winter 2006): 3-16

References[link]

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (December 2009)

External links[link]

• Official website

Alan Alexander Milne  /ˈmɪln/ (18 January 1882 – 31 January 1956) was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.

Biography[link]

A. A. Milne was born in Kilburn, London, to parents Vince Milne, who was Scottish, and Sarah Marie Milne (née Heginbotham) and grew up at Henley House School, 6/7 Mortimer Road (now Crescent), Kilburn, a small public school run by his father.^[1] One of his teachers was H. G. Wells who taught there in 1889–90.^[2] Milne attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge,^[3] where he studied on a mathematics scholarship. While there, he edited and wrote for Granta, a student magazine.^[1] He collaborated with his brother Kenneth and their articles appeared over the initials AKM. Milne's work came to the attention of the leading British humour magazine Punch, where Milne was to become a contributor and later an assistant editor.

Milne joined the British Army in World War I and served as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and later, after a debilitating illness, the Royal Corps of Signals. He was discharged on February 14, 1919.^[4]

After the war, he wrote a denunciation of war titled Peace with Honour (1934), which he retracted somewhat with 1940's War with Honour.^[1][5] During World War II, Milne was one of the most prominent critics of English writer P. G. Wodehouse, who was captured at his country home in France by the Nazis and imprisoned for a year. Wodehouse made radio broadcasts about his internment, which were broadcast from Berlin. Although the light-hearted broadcasts made fun of the Germans, Milne accused Wodehouse of committing an act of near treason by cooperating with his country's enemy. Wodehouse got some revenge on his former friend by creating fatuous parodies of the Christopher Robin poems in some of his later stories, and claiming that Milne "was probably jealous of all other writers.... But I loved his stuff."^[6]

He married Dorothy "Daphne" de Sélincourt in 1913, and their only son, Christopher Robin Milne, was born in 1920. In 1925, A. A. Milne bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex.^[7] During World War II, A. A. Milne was Captain of the Home Guard in Hartfield & Forest Row, insisting on being plain 'Mr. Milne' to the members of his platoon. He retired to the farm after a stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an invalid, and by August 1953 "he seemed very old and disenchanted".^[8] Milne died in January 1956, aged 74.

Literary career[link]

1903 to 1925[link]

After graduating from Cambridge in 1903, A. A. Milne contributed humorous verse and whimsical essays to Punch,^[9][10] joining the staff in 1906 and becoming an assistant editor.^[11]

During this period he published 18 plays and 3 novels, including the murder mystery The Red House Mystery (1922). His son was born in August 1920 and in 1924 Milne produced a collection of children's poems When We Were Very Young, which were illustrated by Punch staff cartoonist E. H. Shepard. A collection of short stories for children Gallery of Children, and other stories that became part of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, were first published in 1925.

Milne was an early screenwriter for the nascent British film industry, writing four stories filmed in 1920 for the company Minerva Films (founded in 1920 by the actor Leslie Howard and his friend and story editor Adrian Brunel). These were The Bump, starring Aubrey Smith; Twice Two; Five Pound Reward; and Bookworms^[12] Some of these films survive in the archives of the British Film Institute. Milne had met Howard when the actor starred in Milne’s play Mr Pim Passes By in London.^[13]

Looking back on this period (in 1926) Milne observed that when he told his agent that he was going to write a detective story, he was told that what the country wanted from a "Punch humorist" was a humorous story; when two years later he said he was writing nursery rhymes, his agent and publisher were convinced he should write another detective story; and after another two years he was being told that writing a detective story would be in the worst of taste given the demand for children's books. He concluded that "the only excuse which I have yet discovered for writing anything is that I want to write it; and I should be as proud to be delivered of a Telephone Directory con amore as I should be ashamed to create a Blank Verse Tragedy at the bidding of others."^[14]

1926 to 1928[link]

The real stuffed toys owned by Christopher Robin Milne and featured in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. They are on display in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (formerly the New York Public Library Main Branch) in New York.

Milne is most famous for his two Pooh books about a boy named Christopher Robin after his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and various characters inspired by his son's stuffed animals, most notably the bear named Winnie-the-Pooh. Christopher Robin Milne's stuffed bear, originally named "Edward",^[15] was renamed "Winnie-the-Pooh" after a Canadian black bear named Winnie (after Winnipeg), which was used as a military mascot in World War I, and left to London Zoo during the war. "The pooh" comes from a swan called "Pooh". E. H. Shepard illustrated the original Pooh books, using his own son's teddy, Growler ("a magnificent bear"), as the model. Other notable characters created by Milne include the bouncy Tigger and gloomy Eeyore.^[16] Christopher Robin Milne's own toys are now under glass in New York.

The fictional Hundred Acre Wood of the Pooh stories derives from Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, South East England, where the Pooh stories were set. Milne lived on the northern edge of the Forest and took his son walking there. E. H. Shepard drew on the landscapes of Ashdown Forest as inspiration for many of the illustrations he provided for the Pooh books. The adult Christopher Robin commented: "Pooh's Forest and Ashdown Forest are identical".^[16] The wooden Pooh Bridge in Ashdown Forest, where Pooh and Piglet invented Poohsticks, is a tourist attraction.^[17]

Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 1926, followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. A second collection of nursery rhymes, Now We Are Six, was published in 1927. All three books were illustrated by E. H. Shepard. Milne also published four plays in this period. He also "gallantly stepped forward" to contribute a quarter of the costs of dramatising P. G. Wodehouse's A Damsel in Distress.^[18] His book The World of Pooh won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958.

1929 onwards[link]

The success of his children's books was to become a source of considerable annoyance to Milne, whose self-avowed aim was to write whatever he pleased and who had, until then, found a ready audience for each change of direction: he had freed pre-war Punch from its ponderous facetiousness; he had made a considerable reputation as a playwright (like his idol J. M. Barrie) on both sides of the Atlantic; he had produced a witty piece of detective writing in The Red House Mystery (although this was severely criticised by Raymond Chandler for the implausibility of its plot). But once Milne had, in his own words, "said goodbye to all that in 70,000 words" (the approximate length of his four principal children's books), he had no intention of producing any reworkings lacking in originality, given that one of the sources of inspiration, his son, was growing older.

His reception remained warmer in America than Britain, and he continued to publish novels and short stories, but by the late 1930s the audience for Milne's grown-up writing had largely vanished: he observed bitterly in his autobiography that a critic had said that the hero of his latest play ("God help it") was simply "Christopher Robin grown up...what an obsession with me children are become!".

Even his old literary home, Punch, where the When We Were Very Young verses had first appeared, was ultimately to reject him, as Christopher Milne details in his autobiography The Enchanted Places, although Methuen continued to publish whatever Milne wrote, including the long poem 'The Norman Church' and an assembly of articles entitled Year In, Year Out (which Milne likened to a benefit night for the author).

A. A. Milne memorial plaque at Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, England, the setting for Winnie the Pooh

He also adapted Kenneth Grahame's novel The Wind in the Willows for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall. The title was an implicit admission that such chapters as Chapter 7, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", could not survive translation to the theatre. A special introduction written by Milne is included in some editions of Grahame's novel.

Several of Milne's children's poems were set to music by the composer Harold Fraser-Simson. His poems have been parodied many times, including with the books When We Were Rather Older and Now We Are Sixty.

The rights to the Pooh books were left to four beneficiaries: his family, the Royal Literary Fund, Westminster School and the Garrick Club.^[19] After Milne's death in 1956, his widow sold her rights to the Pooh characters to the Walt Disney Company, which has made many Pooh cartoon movies, a Disney Channel television show, as well as Pooh-related merchandise. In 2001, the other beneficiaries sold their interest in the estate to the Disney Corporation for $350m. Previously Disney had been paying twice-yearly royalties to these beneficiaries. The estate of EH Shepard also received a sum in the deal. The copyright on Pooh expires in 2026.^[20]

A memorial plaque in Ashdown Forest, unveiled by Christopher Robin in 1979, commemorates the work of A. A. Milne and Shepard in creating the world of Pooh.^[16] Milne once wrote of Ashdown Forest: "In that enchanted place on the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing".^[16]

Religious views[link]

Milne did not speak out much on the subject of religion, although he used religious terms to explain his decision, while remaining a pacifist, to join the army: "In fighting Hitler", he wrote, "we are truly fighting the Devil, the Anti-Christ ... Hitler was a crusader against God."^[21] His best known comment on the subject was recalled on his death:

"The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course."^[22]

He also wrote:

Elizabeth Ann

Said to her Nan “Please will you tell me how God began? Somebody must have made Him. So

Who could it be, 'cos I want to know?”

— A.A. Milne's poem "Explained"^[23]

Works[link]

Novels[link]

• Lovers in London

(1905) (Some consider this more of a short story collection; Milne didn't like it and considered The Day's Play as his first book.)

• Once on a Time (1917)
• Mr. Pim (1921) (A novelisation of his play Mr. Pim Passes By (1919))
• The Red House Mystery (1922)
• Two People (1931) (Inside jacket claims this is Milne's first attempt at a novel.)
• Four Days' Wonder (1933)
• Chloe Marr (1946)

Non-fiction[link]

• Peace With Honour (1934)
• It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer (1939)
• War With Honour (1940)
• Year In, Year Out (1952) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)

[edit] Punch articles

• The Day's Play (1910)
• Once A Week (book) (1914)
• The Holiday Round (1912)
• The Sunny Side (1921)
• Those Were the Days (1929) [The four volumes above, compiled]

Newspaper articles and book introductions[link]

• The Chronicles of Clovis by "Saki" (1911) [Introduction to]
• Not That It Matters (1920)
• By Way of Introduction (1929)

Story collections for children[link]

• Gallery of Children (1925)
• Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) (illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard)
• The House at Pooh Corner (1928) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)
• Short Stories

Poetry Collections for Children[link]

• When We Were Very Young
• Now We Are Six

Story collections[link]

• The Birthday Party (1948)
• A Table Near the Band (1950)

Poetry[link]

• For the Luncheon Interval [poems from Punch]
• When We Were Very Young (1924) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)
• Now We Are Six (1927) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard)
• Behind the Lines (1940)
• The Norman Church (1948)

Screenplays[link]

Milne wrote 4 stories filmed in 1920 for Minerva Films:

• The Bump (starring Aubrey Smith)
• Twice Two
• Five Pound Reward
• Bookworms

Plays[link]

Milne wrote over 30 plays, including:

• Wurzel-Flummery (1917)
• Belinda (1918)
• The Boy Comes Home (1918)
• Make-Believe (1918) (children's play)
• The Camberley Triangle (1919)
• Mr. Pim Passes By (1919)
• The Red Feathers (1920)
• The Romantic Age (1920)
• The Stepmother (1920)
• The Truth about Blayds (1920)
• The Dover Road (1921)
• The Great Broxopp (1921)
• The Lucky One (1922)
• The Artist: A Duologue (1923)
• Give Me Yesterday (1923) (a.k.a. Success in the UK)
• Ariadne (1924)
• The Man in the Bowler Hat: A Terribly Exciting Affair (1924)
• To Have the Honour (1924)
• Portrait of a Gentleman in Slippers (1926)
• Success (1926)
• Miss Marlow at Play (1927)
• The Fourth Wall or The Perfect Alibi (1928)
• The Ivory Door (1929)
• Toad of Toad Hall (1929) (adaptation of The Wind in the Willows)
• Michael and Mary (1930)
• Other People's Lives (1933) (a.k.a. They Don't Mean Any Harm)
• Miss Elizabeth Bennet (1936) [based on Pride and Prejudice]
• Sarah Simple (1937)
• Gentleman Unknown (1938)
• The General Takes Off His Helmet (1939) in The Queen's Book of the Red Cross
• The Ugly Duckling (1941)
• Before the Flood (1951)

Films[link]

Michael and Mary was adapted to cinema in 1931.

The 1963 film The King's Breakfast was based on Milne's poem of the same name.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: A. A. Milne

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: A. A. Milne

• Works by A. A. Milne at Project Gutenberg
• Portraits of A. A. Milne in the National Portrait Gallery.
• Essays by Milne at Quotidiana.org
• Milne extract in the Guardian
• Works by or about A. A. Milne in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• A. A. Milne's profile at Just-Pooh.com
• Obituary for Alan Alexander Milne (German)

Håkan Nesser, Bremen, 2009

Håkan Nesser (born 21 February 1950 in Kumla, Närke) is a Swedish author and teacher who has written a number of successful novels, mostly crime fiction. He has won Best Swedish Crime Novel Award three times, and his novel Carambole won the Glass Key award in 2000. His books have been translated from Swedish into numerous languages.

Early life[link]

Håkan Nesser was born on 21 February 1950, and grew up in Kumla, Örebro County; he has lived most of his adult life in Uppsala. His first novel was published in 1988, but he worked as a teacher until 1998 when he became a full-time author. In August 2006, Håkan Nesser and his wife Elke (a psychiatrist)^[1] moved to Greenwich Village in New York. A few years later the couple packed their bags and moved to London^[2] since it was easier for his wife to find work there.^[3]

Characters and themes[link]

A recurring main character is called Van Veeteren, a detective in the early novels and later the owner of an antique books shop. These books play out in a fictitious city called Maardam, said to be located in northern Europe in a country which is never named but resembles Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. The names however are mostly Dutch.

With his 2006 crime novel Människa utan hund (Human without Dog) Nesser introduced a new main character, Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti, a Swedish police inspector of Italian descent. He has remained the main protagonist in Nesser’s crime books since then. Barbarotti is a more upbeat character than Van Veeteren and the books are firmly set in Sweden, although the town of Kymlinge is fictitious and named after an "abandoned tube station" in Stockholm.

Nesser explained in an 2009 interview that he has two books left in him with Inspector Barbarotti, a novel set in London and a final masterpiece.^[3]

In August 2011 he hinted on his own site that a future book would take place in the "county of Somerset".^[4]

Bibliography[link]

• 1988 - Koreografen
• 1993 - Det grovmaskiga nätet; English translation: The Mind's Eye, 2008
• 1994 - Borkmanns punkt; English translation: Borkmann's Point, 2006
• 1995 - Återkomsten; English translation: The Return, 2007
• 1996 - Barins triangel
• 1996 - Kvinna med födelsemärke; English translation: Woman with Birthmark, 2009
• 1997 - Kommissarien och tystnaden: English translation: The Inspector and Silence, 2010
• 1998 - Kim Novak badade aldrig i Genesarets sjö
• 1998 - Münsters fall: English translation: The Unlucky Lottery, October 2011
• 1999 - Carambole; English translation: Hour of the Wolf, 2012
• 1999 - Flugan och evigheten
• 2000 - Ewa Morenos fall
• 2001 - Svalan, katten, rosen, döden
• 2002 - Och Piccadilly Circus ligger inte i Kumla
• 2002 - Kära Agnes
• 2003 - Fallet G
• 2004 - Skuggorna och regnet
• 2006 - Människa utan hund (Inspector Barbarotti)
• 2007 - En helt annan historia (Inspector Barbarotti)
• 2008 - Berättelse om herr Roos (Inspector Barbarotti)
• 2009 - Maskarna på Carmine Street
• 2010 - De ensamma (Inspector Barbarotti)
• 2011 - Himmel över London ^[5]

Filmography[link]

• Kim Novak Never Swam in Genesaret's Lake (Kim Novak badade aldrig i Genesarets sjö) 2005

• Van Veeteren series
  • Det grovmaskiga nätet (2000, TV)
  • Återkomsten (2001)
  • Kvinna med födelsemärke (2001, TV)
  • Münsters fall (2005)
  • Carambole (2005)
  • Borkmanns punkt (2005)
  • Moreno och tystnaden (2006)
  • Svalan, katten, rosen, döden (2006)
  • Fallet G (2006)

Awards[link]

• 1994 - Best Swedish Crime Novel Award for Borkmanns punkt
• 1996 - Best Swedish Crime Novel Award for Kvinna med födelsemärke
• 2000 - Glass Key award for Carambole
• 2007 - Best Swedish Crime Novel Award for En helt annan historia

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website (Swedish)
• [1] Publisher website