In December I read Brat Farrar (1949) by Josephine Tey which was a let down for me although I enjoyed Tey’s classic Daughter of Time. I also finished The Word Is Murder: A Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery (2017) by Anthony Horowitz. Its the third book of his that I have read this year and The Word Is Murder met all my hopes.

It’s a unique kind of mystery in which a writer named Anthony Horowitz (a fictional version of the author) joins forces with a brilliant but troubled ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne. The two men work together to solve a crime involving a woman, Diana Cowper, who went into a funeral parlor to arrange her funeral and was found murdered the next day.

Hawthorne and Horowitz do not get along together, they are constantly getting on each other’s nerves. But by the end of the novel they are beginning to bond and I am curious where they go next. I recommend The Word Is Murder and pretty much everything Anthony Horowitz writes.

Right now I am in the middle of American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser. Its a classic based on the true crime murder of Grace Brown in 1906:

“Grace Mae Brown (March 20, 1886 – July 11, 1906)[1] was an American woman who was murdered by her boyfriend, Chester Gillette, on Big Moose Lake, New York, after telling him she was pregnant. The murder, and the subsequent trial of the suspect, attracted national newspaper attention”. — Wikipedia.

In An American Tragedy Roberta Alden (Grace Brown) is a young woman working in a factory in upstate NY. She begins a relationship with Clyde Griffiths (Chester Gillette) who has recently moved to upstate NY in the hope of getting ahead in life.

Clyde’s Uncle, Samuel Griffiths, is the owner of the factory but Clyde has never met his Uncle because Clyde’s family is poor and the two branches of the Griffiths family became estranged.  Samuel Griffith sees something in Clyde and gives him a job at the factory which is where Clyde meets Roberta.

The factory forbids office dating. But Clyde and Roberta begin secretly courting anyway and Clyde starts pushing Roberta to go much further, emotionally turning cold towards Roberta when she pleads with him that she can’t take things further. But since Roberta loves Clyde she starts letting him into her room at night and Roberta ends up pregnant.

American Tragedy is a long book but I am finding it a page turner. And Dreiser touches on a number of topics, religion, social class, the condition facing young women who do not come from a family of means. And what I am particularly enjoying is the psychology of this novel as we are inside the thoughts of Roberta but mostly Clyde as a selfish but not evil young man gets himself into a jam, Roberta’s pregnancy, and how the plans for his life will be ruined.  And he then begins to think the unthinkable.

Happy Holidays and I wish everyone a Happy New Year!