Elmore Leonard’s 1991 novel Maximum Bob features, in no particular order: A goofy judge who enjoys giving the hardest time to convicted felons and who comes up with a scheme to use an alligator to rid himself of his airy-fairy wife. The airy-fairy wife, a devotee of crystals and second sight and spirit guides. A…

Clair Huffaker’s 1958 western Posse from Hell is a book of stereotypes twisted out of shape. It takes, for example, the good guy/bad guy dichotomy and shatters it into a kaleidoscopic array of moral ambiguity.  Well, not for the really bad guys — four convicts who, in May, 1881, escape from the death house at…

And, at the 87th precinct house, in the moments after midnight on Christmas morning, a suspect in the squad’s lock-up, like all the others there, heard the cry of a baby boy, new born behind a wall of filing cabinets, and said: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall…

As soon as I finished the 1986 mystery A Taste for Death, I went online to find out if Inspector Kate Miskin would appear in any of P.D. James’s later books. And I was heartened to see that she had a role in nearly all of the seven to come that featured Adam Dalgliesh, the…

In U.S. history, the Mormons — more formally known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — stand alone as the most successful, American-grown religion.  Not only did Joseph Smith, the founder of the faith, create a radically new version of Christianity. But his followers also have had an important impact on American…

The claustrophobic story told by Victor Maskell — a gay, aristocratic Irishman, Cambridge Marxist, international Poussin expert, Russian spy and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, nicknamed Boots by the Queen — is particularly cramped and airless, For one thing, as his story unfolds in John Banville’s 1997 novel The Untouchable, Maskell describes his deep entrenchment…

Andre Norton’s short 1962 novel Eye of the Monster is a disturbing story in which the native race of a world called Ishkur, pejoratively nicknamed Crocs, are brutal, foul-smelling and bestial. For twenty years, the Crocs have been held at bay by the Empire’s Patrol — a space army of sorts — while humans have…

Much is not known about William Shakespeare, as Thomas Marc Parrott acknowledges in his agile, erudite and very helpful 1934 book William Shakespeare: A Handbook.  But the man’s plays and poems do provide a great many clues. For instance, the details that work their way into Shakespeare’s writings indicate that he was not a bookish…

William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have been the touchstone of English and world literature for more than four centuries ago.  But the man behind them, known in his time as an important actor as well as a writer, has been a cipher for later generations. This has bedeviled many scholars over the hundreds of years,…