Charlotte MacLeod

Author Charlotte MacLeod is from Canada: she was born in New Brunswick in 1922, but grew up in Massachusetts. She studied at the Art Institute in Boston and worked for a while as a librarian and copywriter. Beginning in the mid-1960s, MacLeod published novels, initially juvenile fiction and a nonfiction book on astrology. Her first crime novels did not appear until the late 1970s. MacLeod became known for two series she worked on in parallel for many years. Both series follow on fairly seamlessly from the Golden Age crime novels of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1978, MacLeod published the first novel about botany professor Peter Shandy, an expert in crop breeding at a college in Balaclava County, Massachusetts. Not only does Shandy enjoy a legendary reputation as a turnip grower, but as an amateur sleuth he rivals the brighter minds of the genre. However, there aren't many of them in Balaclava County, which is why the local sheriff, a little underexposed in his criminological skills, sometimes feels compelled to officially swear in the plant scholar Shandy as a deputy. Shandy's cases mostly take place in the vicinity of his teaching institution. Since the first volume of the series, he has found active help in the librarian Helen, whom the elderly bachelor quickly marries. Also at the beginning of her detective career, MacLeod's second character in the series, Sarah Kelling, gets married: the widow from Boston's fiercely conservative upper class marries the insurance investigator Max Bittersohn and henceforth goes by the name Sarah Kelling Bittersohn. Her husband, a specialist in art theft, assists her in (almost) all cases - as does a family clan of great-uncles and aunts, including cousins of countless degrees, whose ramifications are almost unmanageable. Both series, MacLeod fans recommend, should be read in order, as at least the later books contain some cross-references to the former. Under the pseudonym Alisa Craig, Charlotte MacLeod has published two other mystery series and a standalone, which have not yet been translated into German. Both series are set in Canada: Madoc Rhys is a police officer with the Royal Canadian Mountain Police in New Brunswick, Osbert Monk is a writer of western novels and a member of the Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club in Ontario (hence the "Grub-and-Stakers" in each series title). Charlotte MacLeod has also written another biography of mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart ("Had She But Known," 1994). Charlotte MacLeod died on January 14, 2005, at a nursing home in Lewiston, Maine.