Friends of Library host mystery writer Carolyn Hart musing on morality of murder
Janel Shoun |
Hart, who has been called a modern-day Agatha Christie, has been praised for the charm and wit of her stories, many of which feature Max and Annie Darling, residents of Broward Rock, a sunny island town and owners of the Death on Demand bookstore. Hart has 2.7 million books in print, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her stand-alone novel Letter from Home.
Hart admits she is a passionate lover of “traditional mystery” stories, often described by critics as “cozy little stories of drawing room crimes in little villages,” she wrote in a 2007 column in The Washington Post. She believes they have great relevance to the turbulence of everyday life.
“(Agatha) Christie knew life as most readers live it, ordinary, unremarkable and fraught with emotion,” she wrote in the Post. “Christie once compared the mystery to the medieval morality play. In the play, audiences saw graphic representations of what happens to lives dominated by lust, gluttony, sloth and all the deadly sins. This is what today’s mysteries offer in a more sophisticated guise.”
Hart will expand on these ideas in her library talk titled “The Morality of the Mystery.” The talk is open to members and potential members of the Friends of the Library. If you are interested in attending, contact Carolyn Wilson at 966-5837.
The life-long Oklahoma City resident, wanted to be a newspaper reporter when she was growing up, and did indeed work in a local newspaper for a while, until her marriage moved her to Washington D.C. and her two children kept her at home, according to a 2007 article in Sooner magazine, the alumni magazine of the University of Oklahoma.
She never gave up her joy of writing, and decided to enter a contest in Writer magazine by writing a mystery novel for girls. She won, and in 1964 The Secret of the Cellars was published.
It would be some years, however, before writing became a steady job. Publishers were only interested in “hard-boiled private eye books written by American men or traditional mysteries written by dead English ladies,” Hart told Sooner magazine. Hart was neither English nor dead, so she wrote several books that were never published or languished at the back of the bookstore, she said.
The rise of author Marcia Muller in 1978 and later Sarah Paretsky and Sue Grafton, opened the doors for traditional mystery novels written by women and Hart walked right on through with Death on Demand.
Given her low expectations for getting published, Hart decided to have some fun with Death on Demand, she told Sooner. She made her protagonist Annie Darling the owner of a mystery book shop. The device allows Hart, even to this day, to drop the names of other mystery writers and characters in her novels. The Death on Demand book store even has a contest, mentioned in every book, where customers are challenged to name a book title based on a list of clues about the mystery, states the Sooner article.
Hart’s latest book is Death Walked In, another Max and Annie Darling mystery which just hit bookshelves this month. Her next expected work in Ghost at Work, a new series featuring Baily Ruth Raeburn, a ghost who resided in life in Adelaide, Okla.
Hart wrote in the Post that she never expected to rack up such a body count in her life, but she knows her tales of murder are serving a greater good. “Mystery readers are good people. Every time they read a mystery they reaffirm a commitment to decency and justice,” she wrote.