The World's Finest Mystery... Read Free Page B

doing a job you may think is redundant, but doing it well. A more original Christie volume, though one less likely to appeal to a wide readership, was Pierre Bayard's Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (New Press), translated from the French by Carol Cosman— if you can wade through the academic jargon, Bayard has an interesting theory to promote.
     
     
They Wrote the Book: Thirteen Women Mystery Writers Tell All (Spinsters Ink), edited by Helen Windrath, is both a valuable technical manual for writers and entertaining reading for fans; while the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century (Crum Creek), edited by Jim Huang, provides a good reading list, heavy on authors of the '80s and '90s, with commentary.
     
     
Again, Ed Hoch's bibliography will provide the full story.
     
     
    A SENSE OF HISTORY
Rue Morgue Press publishers Tom and Enid Schantz continued to reprint worthy writers of the past, including the first American edition of Joanna Cannan's 1939 novel They Rang Up the Police , an outstanding piece of classical detective fiction that can stand comparison with Allingham, Marsh, Sayers, and other Golden Age icons; and Juanita Sheridan's The Chinese Chop , the 1949 novel that introduced Chinese American sleuth Lily Wu, whose other three cases are on Rue Morgue's future schedule.
     
     
Five Star brought us new editions, with an introduction by the author, of Donald E. Westlake's first two Mitchell Tobin novels, Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (1966) and Murder Among Children (1967), originally published as by Tucker Coe; while Vera Caspary's 1943 classic Laura became the first in a series, edited by Otto Penzler for ibooks, of mysteries that became Hollywood films. The e-books/books-on-demand phenomenon allowed contemporary writers like Stuart M. Kaminsky, Dick Lochte, Annette Meyers, and Loren D. Estleman to make their backlists available to readers, a trend that can be expected to grow.
     
     
    AT THE MOVIES
The quality of 2000's crime and mystery movies was far below that of 1999's bumper crop, but there were some good ones, mostly playing the art houses rather than the multiplexes. Best crime film released in the U.S.A. during the year was probably the 1998 British film noir Croupier , directed by Mike Hodges from Paul Mayersberg's script and boasting a great performance by Clive Owen as the title character, a bored writer who takes a casino job that leads him into a web of crime. The Virgin Suicides , directed by Sofia Coppola, who also wrote the screenplay from Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel, is a dark coming-of-age story about the hidden horrors of suburbia and a rare example of the pure whydunit. Writer-director Rod Lurie's The Contender , like his 1999 film Deterrence , shows him as a nimble plotter in the political thriller vein. Under Suspicion , directed by Stephen Hopkins and scripted by Tom Provost and W. Peter Iliff from (via an earlier French version) John Wainwright's 1979 novel Brainwash , may be somewhat stagy in feel, but it's cunningly constructed and makes a great vehicle for the talents of Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman. Gregory Hoblit's Frequency , written by Toby Emmerich, is a suspenseful mystery/science-fiction hybrid: time travel meets get-the-serial-killer.
     
     
Some of the crime films I admired during the year were less well-received by critics, so take these recommendations with a grain of salt. The Harrison Ford/Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle What Lies Beneath , directed by Robert Zemeckis from Clark Gregg's screenplay, struck me as an admirably tricky variation of the Before the Fact am-I-married-to-a-murderer plot. Director Nick Gomez's Drowning Mona , written by Peter Steinfeld, is a tongue-in-cheek small-town black comedy asking which of several reasonable suspects murdered the poisonous title character played by Bette Midler. The Yards , James Gray's downbeat film of civic corruption (scripted with Matt Reeves), had a terrific cast and should have