When I set out to write a post specifically about beloved characters that I believe, in my all-too-mortal opinion, should not have died, in considering that list, I became far more interested in the questions of why they died in the first place and if death was the best writerly choice. So, if you’ll please…
Do you ever get bookstore whiplash? You’re walking casually down the aisle, scanning the titles, when you stop dead in your tracks and whip your head around, thinking, Did I really just see that? Or possibly just What the…? After all, it’s the combination of the title and cover art that attracts the casual browser…
The first American writer to use fingerprints in solving crime was the famous Mark Twain in his perhaps-embellished memoir about life as a steamboat pilot, titled Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. In chapter 31, “A Thumb-print and What Came of It,” he has a character, inspired by an old “French prison-keeper” use a…
