Dive Deep and Deadly

I'm about half-way through this book, the 2000 debut for Glynn Marsh Alam, which I purchased specifically because the heroine was a scuba diver. I'm a scuba diver, who'd like to write mysteries featuring that skill... so thought I'd check up on what others had written.

So far, I'm enjoying it. It's well written. Establishes the ambience of southern Florida, with its ethnicities, the diving in caverns and caves, and so on.

Here's how the back jacket describes the book:
From the Florida swamp land, where sudden violent death is a fact of nature, comes Luanne Fogarty with a knack for survival and solving murders. Lush with the feel of the wild Florida swamp, Dive Deep and Deadly seethes with danger both above ground and in the treacherous underwater caves. This book is a steamy Southern mystery filled with swamp danger and diving know-how.

Fogarty, a scuba diver, does body recovery for the local police force. She is called in when a trio of teenage divers find a woman's body anchored in one of the caves. As Fogarty investigates, more women's bodies come to light, and she realizes she has a serial killer on her hands.

Crocodile on the Sandbank

Elizabeth Peters (also Barbara Michaels) is one of my favorite mystery writers, although I must confess I haven't liked the latest books in her Amelia Peabody series. For no other reason than I don't care for the Ramses/Nefret dynamic.

But the earlier Elizabeth Peters, and Barbara Michaels, are pretty good. (Peters, aka Barbara Mertz, her real name, in which she actually is an Egyptologist), is in her 70s now, and I think every writer declines in their 70s, especially when they write a novel a year...

But that may seem like I'm dissing Elizabeth Peters, and I'm not, for, as I said, I love her early stuff. In particular, Crocodile on the Sandbank, published in 1975, which introduced the world to Amelia Peabody - now Peters' most popular character and the one whom she writes most of her books about.

It starts out similar to Agatha Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit (written in the 1920s) about a woman who is the daughter of an archaeologist, father dies, and she goes off on adventures. (After the first chapter, of course the stories diverge. On a couple of occasions, Peters pays homage to Christie, which is kind of fun.) In Amelia Peabody's case, she comes into a fortune which enables her to travel to Egypt, where she meets Radcliffe Emerson. They spar,they spat, they fall in love. And the mummy walks.

Highly recommended.

Mini-Review: Saddled Wtith Trouble

Saddled With Trouble, by Michele Scott, 2006 - is the first in the "Horse Lover's Mystery Series" - another one of those series where the heroine/detective knows nothing about police work, but nevertheless always gets mixed up in murders.

The author, Michele Scott, is also author of the "Wine Lovers' Mystery Series."

Well, I have to say I didn't care for it very much. The heroine, Michaela Bancroft, is a horse trainer, with a husband who has cheated on her and wants a divorce. The hubby's mistress, a beauty pageant winner, is not shy about harassing Michaela to sign the divorce papers, which she doesn't want to do until her soon-to-be ex owes her a great deal of money.

Michaela's uncle, Lou, another horse trainer, is found murdered in a stall, trampled by a horse.

Michaela sets out to find out who did it. She lives in her house with a new roomate, Camden, a beautiful woman who goes around marrying men for their money. Her latest husband, however, had been too smart for her, and she ended up not getting enough money in the divorce to support her in the habit she'd become accustomed, so she's freeloading off Michaela. (Not that Michaela thinks of it that way - that's my take on it.)

I didn't care for the characters, I didn't care for the soap opera -- I want detectives who don't have personal problems or who have solved them long ago -- and I wasn't very impressed with the writing, either. It just didn't seem to flow.

Warren William as Perry Mason

November, 2007 was "Programmer Month" at TCM, and they showed a lot of the classic crime dramas from the 30s and 40s.

For the first time, I saw Warren William (December 2, 1894 - September 24, 1948) - as Philo Vance, Perry Mason, and Michael Lanyard aka The Lone Wolf.

And I quite like him! He's an excellent actor, handsome, with a sense of humor. Sadly, though, one can see him aging rapidly in the later Lone Wolf pictures (he died at the age of 54 of multiple myeloma (bone cancer)).

The IMDB points out:

Personally, Warren William was a shy and retiring type. Speaking of him, five-time Warners co-star Joan Blondell said that William "was an old man even when he was a young man." According to San Francisco critic Mick LaSalle's 2002 book "Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man" (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002), William, who quite unlike his early Warner Bros.' stereotype as a heartless "love 'em and leave 'em"-style seducer, remained married to one woman throughout his adult life. He was an active inventor with multiple patents, designing one of the first recreational vehicles, reportedly so he could continue to sleep while being driven to the studio in the morning.

In future blog entries I'll discuss Warren William's characterizations of Philo Vance, Perry Mason, and The Lone Wolf.