For books that feature real life figures recast as detectives, we like The Seven Percent Solution, about Freud and Sherlock Holmes, a mystery, and the latter's injected-cocaine addiction. We read The Poe Shadow, listed below, and found it hokey and faux genteel, with unconvicing and stiff adherence to the presumed literary style and mores of Poe's era.....snooze.
"This week the devotees of Richard and Judy's book club will be going out to buy Jed Rubenfeld's excellent The Interpretation of Murder, a historical detective story about Freud and Jung chasing a serial killer during their 1909 visit to New York. If you enjoyed that, you can follow it with two other 2006 novels about towering intellects involved in foul play: Michael Gregorio's The Critique of Criminal Reason, also about a serial killer but this time with Kant joining the investigation, and The Poe Shadow, about a Baltimore lawyer trying to reconstruct the writer's death. Is this turning into a trend?
I've always thought Rousseau was a natural choice for this kind of book. After writing some unpopular anti-religious tracts in 1762, the philosopher found himself in exile for several years, first in Motiers in Switzerland and then in Wootton in Staffordshire. Both these little towns, like Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead, could have seen regular poisonings and stabbings, and Rousseau, with his insight into human wickedness, would have been just the man to unravel them. But which great thinker could you see as the next Sherlock Holmes?
Link: Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books: The case of the philosopher and the murder mystery.
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