The Gentle Art Of Murder

This study of the technique of Agatha Christie's detective fiction--sixty-seven novels and over one hundred short stories--is the first extensive analysis of her accomplishment as a writer. Earl F. Bargannier demonstrates that Christie thoroughly understood the conventions of her genre and, with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, was able to develop for more than fifty years surprising variations within those conventions.

Dorothy and Alan investigate when a body is discovered at the bottom of an elevator shaft during an art department party at Sherebury University.

Murder threatens to disturb the creativeness of Sherebury’s art college One late-summer’s evening, before the beginning of the new term, Dorothy Martin and her husband, retired police detective Alan Nesbitt, are guests at Sherebury University art department’s drinks party to introduce the new teaching assistant, sculptress Gillian Roberts However, tragedy strikes on a tour of the sculpture department, when the lift breaks down and a corpse is discovered at the bottom of the lift shaft. Dorothy and Alan become involved in the ensuing investigation, putting their local knowledge and sleuthing skills to good use once again. But when another member of the art faculty goes missing and someone receives threatening phone calls, it seems the killer still has something to hide and may very well strike again . . .

The seventh volume in Knopf’s critically acclaimed Complete Lyrics series, published in Johnny Mercer’s centennial year, contains the texts to more than 1,200 of his lyrics, several hundred of them published here for the first time. Johnny Mercer’s early songs became staples of the big band era and were regularly featured in the musicals of early Hollywood. With his collaborators, who included Richard A. Whiting, Harry Warren, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen, he wrote the lyrics to some of the most famous standards, among them, “Too Marvelous for Words,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “Skylark,” “I’m Old-Fashioned,” and “That Old Black Magic.” During a career of more than four decades, Mercer was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song an astonishing eighteen times, and won four: for his lyrics to “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” (music by Warren), “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (music by Carmichael), and “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses” (music for both by Henry Mancini). You’ve probably fallen in love with more than a few of Mercer’s songs–his words have never gone out of fashion–and with this superb collection, it’s easy to see that his lyrics elevated popular song into art.

By dayight, three Midwestern college students are anonymous faces in a backpack-sporting crowd. By moonlight, they're responsible for some of the ghastliest crimes in American history. To them it's a joke. For the campus and surrounding town, it's a nightmare. And for anyone who crosses them, it's a crash-course in... The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Read the story behind one of the most ghoulish murder sprees ever carried out-- told first-hand by the killers themselves.

Includes Part 1, Number 2: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals July - December)

Blunt Traumas thoughtfully engages responses to suffering and death with compassion and brutal honesty applying a variety of methodologies, including case studies, fieldwork, systematic philosophy, and historical and textual analysis.