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Relax, it’s only magic: a list of witchy reading for Hallowe’en
It’s Hallowe’en! I wanted to step away from Miss Marple for one more week (we’ll be back next week with The Body in the Library!) to get in the spooky spirit. So I put together a Hallowe’en reading list with an investigative twist. Our theme today is mysteries that feature witches of one kind or…
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The hidden potential of airport bookstores (and my favorite one!)
I spend a reasonable amount of time in Major Metropolitan Airports, so I like to think I’m familiar with airport bookstores. When I passed through Charlotte’s airport recently, many of the usual bestsellers were prominently displayed on the newsstand shelves. The bookstores in CLT also had a similar volume of books as others I’ve seen…
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The Murder at the Vicarage Part 2: The Adapter’s Dilemma
(As before, spoilers!) When we left off with The Murder at the Vicarage, we ended on a challenging conclusion for any literary adapter: the novel, while a reasonably interesting mystery, is not a great example of a Miss Marple book. Specifically, it exhibits some rather large “deviations from type” that likely force an adapter to…
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The Murder at the Vicarage Part 1: What makes a good Miss Marple novel?
So, here we go with the first in a series on adaption! The Murder at the Vicarage is the first of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series. The plot revolves around the murder of Colonel Protheroe, a blustering ex-millitary man who serves as a magistrate in St. Mary Mead. When he dies of a gunshot in…
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A Series is Announced: Exploring serialized adaptation with Miss Marple
I’ve always found the art of adaptation – taking a novel and transforming it for a different medium – particularly interesting. It started with my love of the Harry Potter series – specifically, with the film adaptation of Goblet of Fire. I’m pretty sure young Ellora went through all five stages of grief as she…