The Smiler With The Knife

Detective Nigel Strangeways, and his explorer wife Georgia have taken a cottage in the countryside. They are slowly beginning to adjust to a more relaxed way of life when Georgia finds a mysterious locket in their garden and unwittingly sets the couple on a collision course with a power-hungry movement aimed at overthrowing the government. It will take all of Nigel's brilliance and Georgia's bravery if they are to infiltrate the order and unmask the conspirators.

In recent years, lesbians and gay men have developed a new, aggressive style of politics. At the same time, innovative intellectual energies have made queer theory an explosive field of study. In "Fear of a Queer Planet", Michael Warner draws on emerging new queer politics, and shows how queer activists have come to challenge basic assumptions about the social and political world. Existing traditions of theory - Marxism, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, anthropology, legal theory, nationalism, and antinationalism - have too often presupposed a heterosexual society, as the essays in this volume demonstrate. "Fear of a Queer Planet" suggests a new agenda for social theory. It moves beyond the idea that lesbians and gay men share a minority identity and special interests and that their issues can be subordinated to more general social conflicts. Instead, Warner and the other contributors to this volume show that queer sexualities take many forms, are the subject of many kinds of conflict and struggles, and must be taken as a starting point in thinking about cultural politics. This collection explores the impact of ACT UP, Queer Nation, multiculturalism, the new religious right, outing, queerness, postmodernism, and other shifts in the politics of sexuality. The authors featured speak from different backgrounds of gender, race, nationality, and discipline. Together, they show how struggles over sexuality have profound implications for progressive politics, social theory, and cultural studies. Michael Warner has written extensively on censorship and the public sphere, the construction of American literary history, and the social and political implication of literary theories. He is author of "The Letter of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America" and co-editor of "The Origins of Literary Studies in America: A Documentary Anthology".

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective traces the impact of legendary director Orson Welles on contemporary mass media entertainment and suggests that, ironically, we can see Welles’s performance genealogy most clearly in his unfinished RKO projects. Author Marguerite H. Rippy provides the first in-depth examination of early film and radio projects shelved by RKO or by Welles himself. While previous studies of Welles largely fall into the categories of biography or modernist film studies, this book extends the understanding of Welles via postmodern narrative theory and performance analysis, weaving his work into the cultural and commercial background of its production. By identifying the RKO years as a critical moment in performance history, Rippy synthesizes scholarship that until now has been scattered among film studies, narrative theory, feminist critique, American studies, and biography. Building a bridge between auteur and postmodern theories, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects offers a fresh look at Welles in his full complexity. Rippy trains a postmodern lens on Welles’s early projects and reveals four emerging narrative modes that came to define his work: deconstructions of the first-person singular; adaptations of classic texts for mass media; explorations of the self via primitivism; and examinations of the line between reality and fiction. These four narrative styles would greatly influence the development of modern mass media entertainment. Rippy finds Welles’s legacy alive and well in today’s mockumentaries and reality television. It was in early, unfinished projects where Welles first toyed with fact and fiction, and the pleasure of this interplay still resonates with contemporary culture. As Rippy suggests, the logical conclusion of Welles’s career-long exploration of “truthiness” lies in the laughs of fake news shows. Offering an exciting glimpse of a master early in his career, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects documents Welles’s development as a storyteller who would shape culture for decades to come.

At the age of twenty-five, Orson Welles (1915–1985) directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film ever made. But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system. His work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the wide popular following he had once enjoyed as a young actor-director on the radio. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles’s career after Kane was a long decline and that he spent his final years doing little but eating and making commercials while squandering his earlier promise. In this intimate and often surprising personal portrait, Joseph McBride shows instead how Welles never stopped directing radical, adventurous films and was always breaking new artistic ground as a filmmaker. McBride is the first author to provide a comprehensive examination of the films of Welles's artistically rich yet little-known later period in the United States (1970–1985), when McBride knew and worked with him. McBride reports on Welles's daringly experimental film projects, including the legendary 1970–1976 unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’s satire of Hollywood during the “Easy Rider era”; McBride gives a unique insider perspective on Welles from the viewpoint of a young film critic playing a spoof of himself in a cast headed by John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. To put Welles’s widely misunderstood later years into context, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? reexamines the filmmaker’s entire life and career. McBride offers many fresh insights into the collapse of Welles’s Hollywood career in the 1940s, his subsequent political blacklisting, and his long period of European exile. An enlightening and entertaining look at Welles's brilliant and enigmatic career as a filmmaker, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? serves as a major reinterpretation of Welles’s life and work. McBride clears away the myths that have long obscured Welles’s later years and have caused him to be falsely regarded as a tragic failure. McBride’s revealing portrait of this great artist will change the terms of how Orson Welles is understood as a man, an actor, a political figure, and a filmmaker.

Others concentrate more on analysis of the subject novel itself, indicating more briefly how that book relates to those which follow it. Some discuss such questions as what exactly is the first novel in some rather complex series and in several cases more than one initiating book is discussed. No attempt has been made to include consideration of a representative sample of the various types of detective series, but a variety of authors is covered, ranging from such classics as Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and Dorothy L. Sayers, to more recent authors like James McClure, Joseph Hansen, and Colin Dexter.