Murder and the Muse

Murder and the Muse PDF Author: Alexei Bayer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781880100493
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
KGB Chief Yuri Andropov himself has tapped Senior Detective Matyushkin to solve a brazen jewel heist from Picasso's wife at the posh Metropole Hotel. But when the case bleeds over into murder, machinations, and international intrigue, dredging up long-forgotten histories from the Civil War, not everyone is eager to see where the clues might lead. Yet Matyushkin - as relentless and gut-driven as ever - won't be stopped, even if it means taking on his partner, the KGB, and a ghost from decades past. In this third installment in the Matyushkin Case Files, Bayer is in top form, painting a vivid picture not just of life in 1960s Moscow, but of connected events half a century before, when the Soviet regime was being twisted and shaped by war and revolution. A page-turning mystery rich in historical detail and compelling characters.

Murder and the Muse

Murder and the Muse PDF Author: Alexei Bayer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781880100493
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
KGB Chief Yuri Andropov himself has tapped Senior Detective Matyushkin to solve a brazen jewel heist from Picasso's wife at the posh Metropole Hotel. But when the case bleeds over into murder, machinations, and international intrigue, dredging up long-forgotten histories from the Civil War, not everyone is eager to see where the clues might lead. Yet Matyushkin - as relentless and gut-driven as ever - won't be stopped, even if it means taking on his partner, the KGB, and a ghost from decades past. In this third installment in the Matyushkin Case Files, Bayer is in top form, painting a vivid picture not just of life in 1960s Moscow, but of connected events half a century before, when the Soviet regime was being twisted and shaped by war and revolution. A page-turning mystery rich in historical detail and compelling characters.

Murder Was Not a Crime

Murder Was Not a Crime PDF Author: Judy E. Gaughan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292721110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Embarking on a unique study of Roman criminal law, Judy Gaughan has developed a novel understanding of the nature of social and political power dynamics in republican government. Revealing the significant relationship between political power and attitudes toward homicide in the Roman republic, Murder Was Not a Crime describes a legal system through which families (rather than the government) were given the power to mete out punishment for murder. With implications that could modify the most fundamental beliefs about the Roman republic, Gaughan's research maintains that Roman criminal law did not contain a specific enactment against murder, although it had done so prior to the overthrow of the monarchy. While kings felt an imperative to hold monopoly over the power to kill, Gaughan argues, the republic phase ushered in a form of decentralized government that did not see itself as vulnerable to challenge by an act of murder. And the power possessed by individual families ensured that the government would not attain the responsibility for punishing homicidal violence. Drawing on surviving Roman laws and literary sources, Murder Was Not a Crime also explores the dictator Sulla's "murder law," arguing that it lacked any government concept of murder and was instead simply a collection of earlier statutes repressing poisoning, arson, and the carrying of weapons. Reinterpreting a spectrum of scenarios, Gaughan makes new distinctions between the paternal head of household and his power over life and death, versus the power of consuls and praetors to command and kill.

Murder after Death

Murder after Death PDF Author: Richard Sugg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729977
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Just as museum exhibits of plastinated corpses, television dramas about forensics, and books about the eventual fate of human remains provoke interest and generate ethical debates today, anatomy was a topic of fascination-and autopsies a spectator pastime-in England from the mid-Elizabethan era through the outbreak of civil war. Rather than regard such preoccupations as purely macabre, Richard Sugg sees them as precursors of a profoundly new scientific and cultural discourse. Tracing the influence of continental anatomy on English literature across the period, Sugg begins his exploration with the essentially sacralizing aspects of dissection—as expressed, for instance, in the search for the anatomical repository of the soul—before detailing ways in which science and religion diverged from and eventually opposed each other. In charting this transition, Sugg draws his evidence from the fine detail of literary language, moving from sermons to plays, medical textbooks to sonnets, and from sensational short tales to Thomas Nashe's proto-novel The Unfortunate Traveller. As Sugg shows, the study of anatomy first offered to positively revitalize many areas of religious rhetoric. In time, however, the rising forces of early scientific enquiry transformed the body into an increasingly alien and secular entity. Within this evolution the author finds a remarkably rich, subtle, and unstable set of attitudes, with different forms of violence, different versions of the interior body, and implicit social, religious, and psychological stances variously cooperating or competing for supremacy.

Fear and the Muse Kept Watch

Fear and the Muse Kept Watch PDF Author: Andy McSmith
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595580565
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
"Can great art be produced in a police state? Josif Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in world history. Nevertheless, Stalinist Russia produced an outpouring of artistic works of immense power--from the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam to the opera Peter and the Wolf, the film Alexander Nevsky, and the novels The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago. More than a dozen great artists were visible enough for Stalin to take an interest in them--which meant he chose whether they were to live in luxury and be publicly honored or to be sent to the Lubyanka for torture and execution. Journalist and novelist Andy McSmith brings together the stories of these artists--including Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Dmitri Shostakovich, and many others--revealing how they pursued their art often at great personal risk. It was a world in which the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose bright yellow tunic was considered a threat to public order under the tsars, struggled to make the communist authorities see the value of avant garde art; Babel publicly thanked the regime for allowing him the privilege of not writing; and Shostakovich's career veered wildly between public disgrace and wealth and acclaim. An extraordinary work of historical recovery, Fear and the Muse Kept Watch is also a bold exploration of the triumph of art during terrible times"--

Murder and Masculinity

Murder and Masculinity PDF Author: Rebecca E. Biron
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826513472
Category : Latin American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Rebecca Biron breaks new ground in this study of masculinity, violence, and the strategic construction of collective political identities in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. By engaging current sociological, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, Murder and Masculinity analyzes the cliche of proving virility through violence against women. Biron develops her argument through close readings of five works: Jorge Luis Borges's "La intrusa," Armonia Somer's "El despojo," Clarice Lispector's A Maca no Escuro, Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair, and Reinaldo Arenas's El Asalto. Although men murdering women is often interpreted as nothing more than machista misogyny, Biron argues that the five narratives addressed in this book show that healed masculinities are essential to the achievement of cultural identity and political autonomy in Latin America. The introduction to this study deftly situates Biron's work in relation to previous theoretical arguments on the social and political dimensions of Latin American writing. The five subsequent chapters offer superb analyses of the individual texts. Like their male protagonists who experiment with the psychological and legal extremes of gender division, these narratives risk nonconformity to the laws of genre in their quest for liberation from violent social and literary conventions. In combining elements of detective stories, crime narratives, psychological case studies, and magical or grotesque realism, they offer metafictional commentary on a network of discourses that confuses images of masculinity, national identity, and political autonomy in postcolonial Latin America.

Murder at the Dacha

Murder at the Dacha PDF Author: Alexei Bayer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781880100813
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case. Then there is the KGB colonel who seems a bit too interested in the course of Matyushkin's investigation... and Pavel's womanizing office mate, who gets involved with a subject of the case... and a series of petty burglaries that defy resolution... and of course Pavel's complicated love interest, who is as prickly as she is perceptive... In his debut Russian crime novel set in 1960s Moscow, Alexei Bayer peels back the layers of late Soviet life to offer a vivid, gripping tale of deception, greed, murder, and a simple detective just trying to do his job.

Murder on the Ohio Belle

Murder on the Ohio Belle PDF Author: Stuart W. Sanders
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081317872X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
In March 1856, a dead body washed onto the shore of the Mississippi River. Nothing out of the ordinary. In those days, people fished corpses from the river with alarming frequency. But this body, with its arms and legs tied to a chair, struck an especially eerie chord. The body belonged to a man who had been a passenger on the luxurious steamboat known as the Ohio Belle, and he was the son of a southern planter. Who had bound and pitched this wealthy man into the river? Why? As reports of the killing spread, one newspaper shuddered, "The details are truly awful and well calculated to cause a thrill of horror." Drawing on eyewitness accounts, Murder on the Ohio Belle uncovers the mysterious circumstances behind the bloodshed. A northern vessel captured by secessionists, sailing the border between slave and free states at the edge of the frontier, the Ohio Belle navigated the confluence of nineteenth-century America's greatest tensions. Stuart W. Sanders dives into the history of this remarkable steamer—a story of double murders, secret identities, and hasty getaways—and reveals the bloody roots of antebellum honor culture, classism, and vigilante justice.

Crime in Verse

Crime in Verse PDF Author: Ellen L. O'Brien
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814257425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Over the last few decades, Victorian scholars have produced many nuanced studies connecting the politics of crime to the generic developments of the novel-and vice versa. Ellen L. O'Brien's Crime in Verse grants the same attention and status to poetic representations of crime. Considering the literary achievements and cultural engagements of poetry while historicizing murder's entanglement in legal fictions, punitive practices, medical theories, class conflicts, and gender codes, O'Brien argues that shifting approaches to poetry and conflicted understandings of murder allowed poets to align problems of legal and literary interpretation in provocative, disruptive, and innovative ways. Developing focused analyses of generic and discursive meanings, individual chapters examine the classed politics of crime and punishment in the broadside ballad, the epistemological tensions of homicidal lunacy and criminal responsibility in the dramatic monologue, and the legal and ideological frictions of domestic violence in the verse novel and verse drama. Their juxtaposition of the rhymes of anonymous street balladeers, the underexamined verse of "minor" poets, and the familiar poems of canonical figures suggests the interactive and intertextual relationships informing poetic agendas and political arguments. As it simultaneously reconsiders the institutional and ideological status of murder and the aesthetic and political interests of poetry, Crime in Verse offers new ways of thinking about Victorian poetry's contents and contexts.

The Ghost and the Muse

The Ghost and the Muse PDF Author: Bobbi Holmes
Publisher: Bobbi Holmes
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description


Murder in the Mews

Murder in the Mews PDF Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007234481
Category : Detective and mystery stories
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
How did a woman holding a pistol in her right hand manage to shoot herself in the left temple? And who destroyed the "eternal triangle" of love involving renowned beauty, Valentine Chantry?