Hugger Mugger In The Louvre

The gendarmes are baffled and all Paris is agog at the disappearance of a rare Watteau print. Enter master sleuth Homer Evans, whose hilarious approach to crime-solving follows a twisted trail from the darkest recesses of the Louvre to underworld lairs, the studios of shady art dealers, and an insane asylum. Evans and his zany associates—including his sharpshooting girlfriend, Mademoiselle Montana, and his drinking buddy, Gonzo—trace a bizarre series of clues to uncover an ever-thickening plot involving fraud, kidnapping, and murder. Author Elliot Paul satirized the conventions of detective fiction with the first Homer Evans adventure, The Mysterious Mickey Finn. This sequel, hailed as "an excellent cocktail" by The New Republic, offers another furious frolic that upends every convention of the traditional murder mystery.

Homer Evans has a wacky group of friends who lead you all over Paris, up and down the Seine, through cafes filled with celebrities, taxidermist shops, subway stations, the musty dens of Egyptologists and the wards of a fantastic madhouse. There is violence aplenty and corpses are in the most unexpected places. The New York Herald Tribune Books says, "This, as you might guess, is the funniest mystery on tap-that is, the funniest by far, for all other comic thrillers seem pale and wan beside Mr. Paul's robustious works." You can't fail to get plenty of gusty guffaws and spine-tickling chills as you join lovely Miriam Leonard, hard-drinking Norwegian-American painter Hjalmar Jansen, former member of the Tsar's army Lvov Kvek, Chief of Detectives Fremont of the Paris Police, and the medical examiner, Dr. Hyacinthe Toudoux, to help Homer Evans solve this mystery that starts with the theft of a famous Watteau painting from the Louvre. "Fantastically amusing and thrilling . . . completely cockeyed and hugely entertaining." Jack Ketch, New York Herald Tribune"

All Paris is agog at the disappearance of a rare Watteau print until the intervention of a master sleuth and his zany companions. "An excellent cocktail." — The New Republic.

This book focuses on the distinctive role that artists have played in detective fiction--as detectives, as villains and victims, and as bystanders. With a few significant exceptions, literary detectives have always identified themselves as essentially the deconstructors of the artful crimes of others. They may use various methods--ratiocinative, scientific, or hard-boiled--but they always unravel the threads that the villains have woven into deceptive covers for their crimes. The detective does, in the end, produce a work of art: a narrative that explains everything that needs explanation. But the detective's moral work is often juxtaposed to the aesthetic work of the painters, poets, and writers that the detective encounters during an investigation. The author surveys this juxtaposition in works by important authors from the early development of the genre (Poe, Conan Doyle), the golden age (Bentley, Christie, Sayers, James, et al.), and the hard-boiled era (Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, Spicer et al.).

Definitive, full-scale biography and critical study of great 18th-century composer. Rameau's life and times, influence on Gluck, acoustic and harmonic theories, other topics, plus full treatment of great operas and ballets. Over 300 musical examples.

Thorough cultivation instructions for over 500 shrubs, trees, annuals, perennials, herbs, and vegetables, plus instructions for arranging, cutting, forcing, and more. Will help you design a garden that provides a variety of colors, blooms, and forms in a harmonious scheme. Specific instructions for drying 371 different plants. 33 photographs, 142 drawings.

Coots, bitterns, rails, crakes, cranes, herons, egrets, many others. 180 photographs.