Charlotte, Oscar & Co. - Los Angeles Times
From the Los Angeles Times
DARK PASSAGES
Charlotte, Oscar & Co.
When literary figures are turned into detectives, there’s great promise in the material–and little margin for error
By Sarah Weinman
May 11, 2008
Where better for a writer to turn for inspiration than to reality? This is especially true of the mystery fiction micro-trend in which authors fashion real-life figures into detectives. It’s tricky territory because the margin of error is so tiny. For every “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” the 1974 novel in which author Nicholas Meyer brought Sigmund Freud into the orbit of Sherlock Holmes, there is “Dead, Mr. Mozart,” Bernard Bastable’s less-than-stellar 1995 book in which the famed composer becomes a detective, or the perplexingly popular Queen Elizabeth I crime novels by Karen Harper.
Perhaps mystery novelists are better off sticking to other writers for their real-life protagonists. Ambrose Bierce, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Louisa May Alcott, Beatrix Potter, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and William Shakespeare are among those who have taken their place among fictional detectives — as has Jane Austen, most recently in “Jane and the Barque of Frailty” (Bantam: 352 pp., $6.99 paper), the ninth Austen mystery by Stephanie Barron.
Crime writers are hardly exempt from this type of reinvention, what with Joe Gores’ “Hammett,” an excellent hard-boiled novel about Sam Spade’s creator, and “Manifesto for the Dead,” Domenic Stansberry’s noirish ode to a down-and-out Jim Thompson. At this rate, it won’t be too long before a fictional Donald Westlake is asked to pull a caper alongside Dortmunder or Lilian Jackson Braun is solving the mysterious death of Qwilleran in Pickax.
The appeal of real-life detectives, as best as I can surmise, is twofold. Cont….

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