Are you in the mood for a light and breezy book about how gardens and gardeners feature in crime and mystery writing? If so, I have the book for you. I am not a gardener, in fact my great grandparents who ran a greenhouse would be shocked at my inability to understand the finer points of plants and their needs and five years of working on a living history farm did not improve the situation. But it did introduce me to the author of Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers. Marta McDowell works in heritage landscapes and teaches at the New York Botanical Garden.
I had been meaning to read one of Marta’s books for ages, she has placed herself in a niche of writing about authors and their gardens (Beatrix Potter, Emily Dickinson, Laura Ingalls Wilder) but when I spotted this one, I put in my library request right away. By and large I got what I was looking for here, McDowell works through various areas of writing mechanics and marries them to gardening topics to create her chapters, taking us through Gardening Detectives, Setting, Means, and Authors Who Garden (including Agatha Christie!) as well as many other spots in under 200 pages. She also includes a booklist to help readers who want to keep exploring the horticultural avenues of mysteries. As I’m not a gardener I don’t think I got as much out of this as others will, but I think it might make a great gift for the combined reader-gardener in your life.
Bingo Square: Earth Day. I find myself wanting to make a quip about playing in dirt before you end up six feet under but not being able to land on it exactly so there you go.
Bingo #8: Dun-Dun, Horses, Smash, Earth Day, Tech
Bingo #9: Rage, Fiasco, Golden, Earth Day, Fanfic
