The world of mystery and crime fiction has been the subject of a numerous recent reference tomes, from Willetta Heising's excellent Detecting Women and Detecting Men to The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. The former books are notable for their comprehensive cataloging of contemporary writers, and the latter succeeds by its reliance on a diverse range of authorities. But Bruce Murphy's The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery is much more a reader's book.
The Murder at the Vicarage : B2 (Collins Agatha Christie ELT Readers)
Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully adapted versions are shorter with the language targeted at upper-intermediate learners (CEF level B2). Each reader includes:
In New Orleans an attorney, depressed and suicidal, does himself in. But it is neither deft nor private and in fact is witnessed by Mark Sway, a bright 11-year-old, who hears from the dying man a deadly secret about a Louisiana senator's murder. The accused killer, Mafia thug Barry Muldanno, is about to go on trial.
In these timeless and witty essays George Orwell explores the English love of reading about a good murder in the papers (and laments the passing of the heyday of the 'perfect' murder involving class, sex and poisoning), as well as unfolding his trenchant views on everything from boys' weeklies to naughty seaside postcards.
Stories of True Crime in Tudor and Stuart England is an original collection of thirty stories of true crime during the period 1580-1700. Published in short books known as chapbooks, these stories proliferated in early modern popular literature. The chapbooks included in this collection describe serious, horrifying and often deeply personal stories of murder and attempted murder, infanticide, suicide, rape, arson, highway robbery, petty treason and witchcraft.
