A telephone-bell rang in darkness. When it had rung three times bed-springs creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said:
“Hello. Yes, speaking. Dead? Yes, 15 minutes. Thanks.”
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
It’s time for a mystery. Hard-boiled private-eye capers, intellectual Sherlock Holmes puzzlers and modern crime thrillers have been the driving force behind books, television shows and movies for decades.
Given the popularity of the humble gumshoe genre, it’s no wonder that mysteries have made the jump to the Internet.
Mystery sites abound on the World Wide Web, giving whodunit fans a chance to read reviews of the latest novels, scan biographies of favorite writers and actors and join in on-line mystery discussion groups.
Perhaps one of the most impressive research tools for mystery buffs is the A&E Television Network’s Online Mystery Database (www.aetv.com/mystery), which is a link off the newly redesigned A&E Television page. The database allows users to plug in the name of an author, actor, book, movie or television show to get pages of useful information.
Created by the late mystery writer William DeAndrea, the A&E Mystery Online Database includes some obscure writers, cult authors and the pseudonyms of famous writers (such as Barbara Vine, who is really Ruth Rendell).
“We’ve added a function that will allow you to misspell a name and the database will still come back with something that sounds like or is similar to the name you entered,” said Todd Tarpley, A&E’s new media director. This is a necessity in the Internet community, where spelling is often, well, eccentric.
The database also lists authors other Web sites ignore. A query for Sara Paretsky, the Chicago author who created the popular female sleuth V.I. Warshawski, turned up blank in every other database. A&E had a full rundown of her work.
There’s also fascinating background on Dashiell Hammett (who really did work as a detective), Tony Hillerman (who went to a Native American elementary school), Patricia Highsmith (who forsook the United States for a more appreciative public in Europe) and Alfred Hitchcock (who traced his fascination with guilt, fear and redemption to his Roman Catholic upbringing, and he remained a lifelong churchgoer).
