Sorry about the blank message. I hit the "enter" key by
mistake, and there it went.
Here's the question, which I'm passing on for a friend:
Our friend, Fred Patten, has asked for help in tracking down
some stories. Any replies may be sent to
fredpatten@earthlink.net:
"...there are very few genuine noir mysteries featuring
talking animals. It is padded with plenty of pastiches and
comedies including "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and lots of
the
"pet detective" stories about the cats and dogs of human
amateur detectives who secretly help their "companions"
behind their backs; Carole Nelson Douglas' "Midnight Louie"
series, Rita Mae Brown's "Mrs. Murphy" series, and so
on.
However, I had to omit one particularly unusual-seeming
series because I could not find out enough information about
it. June Moffatt, can you help with your Bouchercon contacts?
This is Christopher Reed's "Manx McCatty" series:
"The Big Scratch: A Manx McCatty Mystery" (Ballantine Books
1988), "Die Katzen-Gang: Ein Katzenkrimi mit Manx
McCatty"
(Bastei Lubbe Verlag 1995), and "Der Fluch der Weissen Katze:
Ein Katzen Krimi mit Manx McCatty" (Bastei Lubbe Verlag
1996). Why one novel published in America and two in Germany
seven and eight years later? The Library of Congress and the
Deutsche Bibliothek confirm that these are the only three
published -- or possible two, since "Der Fluch der Weissen
Katze" could be a translation of "The Big Scratch". That was
a Ballantine original paperback now out of print, described
in one brief synopsis as "A feline sleuth investigates white
cat slavery in San Francisco". Another describes it as a
talking-animal pastiche of hard-boiled P.I. novels. I do not
read German, so the only information I can glean from the
summaries of the two novels on the Amazon.de website is that
they are also set in San Francisco."
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Apr 2002 EDT