CRIME FICTION WRITERS by

Patricia Highsmith

2021-10-20 06:38:25 UTC

Name: Patricia
Last name: Highsmith

-PERSONAL INFORMATION-
(Born name: Mary Patricia Plangman)
Born: Fort Worth, Texas, January 19, 1921.
Death: Locarno, Switzerland, February 4, 1995.
Cause of death: Aplastic anemia and lung cancer.

-PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION-
Occupation: Novelist.
Years active: Since 1950.
Movement: Modernism.
Pseudonym: Claire Morgan
Genre: Crime and suspense novels.
Outstanding work: Strangers on a train.

Awards:

• O. Henry Award (1946)
• Grand Prize for Police Literature (1957)
• Edgar Award (1963)
• Gold Dagger (1964)
• Prize for Black Humor (1975)
• Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (1990)

-BIOGRAPHY-
Her parents, Jay Bernard Plangman and Mary Coates, divorced before she was born.

Her mother married Stanley Highsmith, from whom Patricia took the surname. Patricia always had a complicated relationship with them.

Her mother tried to have an abortion by drinking turpentine (aguarrás), during her pregnancy. It inspired her to write "The Terrapin," in which a young man stabs her mother.

She was interested in issues related to guilt, lies and crime, which later became the central themes in his work.

She graduated in 1942 from Barnard College.
At the age of 22 he began to write his first novel “The click of the shutting”, never published.
In 1950 he published his first novel, “Strangers on a train”, for which she rose to fame a year later with the film adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock.

In 1952 her novel "The Price of Salt" appeared under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.

The pessimism of her stories, her exclusion from all sentimentality, and the materialistic cruelty of her ethical analyzes were unwelcome in the United States, but not in Europe.

She lived in East Anglia (United Kingdom) and in France, and her last years were spent in Tegna west of Locarno (Switzerland), where she died.

MORE THINGS:
"Carol" the movie based on the book "The Price of Salt" by Patricia. It is about the problematic love story between two women, with an unusual happy ending for the time.


All her material is kept in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.

STEPHEN KING

2021-10-20 06:38:50 UTC

Who is he? Stephen Edwin King was born in September 21, 1947. Is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science, fiction and fantasy novels.
His books have sold more than 350 million copies, and many have been adapted into films, series, miniseries and comic books.

How did he become such a famous author? From the very beginning he wrote short stories in his free time, as he grow up he started to gain knowledge in horror genre.
As a child, he witnessed one of friend being struck and killed by a train.
Experts have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired some of his works.
He began writing for fun while still in school and later selling stories to his friends based on movies he has seen.
Even though he was forced by teachers to return the money back to them, he independently published stories.

The most known works:
- The shinning (El resplandor): it is his third published novel on first bestseller. The characters are influenced by his personal experiences including his visit to “The Stanley Hotel” and his struggle with alcoholism.
The film takes place in Colorado. The history of the hotel includes the deaths of some of its guests.
Jack, his wife and their son moved into the hotel. Jack is a writer and recovering alcoholic with anger issues which had cost him several accidents. Dani, his son, possesses psychic abilities which enable him to read minds… Do you think they would survive the first night?
- It: A monster who gets powerful by kid’s fears.

Awards:
He had won a big amount of awards in his career, such as National Book Award in 2003 or his most recent one in 2014 as the best Translated Mystery fiction of the year in Japan.

The most spechless curiosities are:
1. His father abandoned his family, when he was only two.
2- He almost lose his leg in an accident. In 1999 he was swept along by a track and fell into a ditch.
3- In 3 of his homes there were committed suicides.
4- He doesn’t like to firm autographs.

Fun fact: We think that he looks like Randall of "Monsters, Inc."

Conclusion: Finally we have chosen this author and director in order to attract our pupils to read his best stories and get to know his magnificent mind.

Book trailer: "REVIVAL"
https://youtu.be/PF7g7Dib1YM

Christianna Brand

2021-10-20 06:39:39 UTC

Biography:
Christianna Brand was born Mary Christianna Milne the 17th of December 1907 in Malaya but spent the most of her childhood in India and England, where she attend a Franciscan convent school in Somerset.

She was a British crime writer and children's author.
Before become an author, she worked as a model, shop assistant, governess and dancer in addition to a couple of nounentretainment related jobs.

She married Roland Lewis. Mary Lewis died on 11th of March 1988. When she was 80.

Her first novel, Death in High Heels, was written while she was working as a salesperson, arising her idea from her fantasies of eliminating an annoying coworker. Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police, first appeared in the book Heads you lose in 1941, being one of its most appreciated characters. This character would later appear in another seven of his novels. Brand's most famous novel is Green for Danger. This novel find out who the killer is, was adapted into a film by Eagle-Lion Films in 1946. She was a candidate for the Edgar Awards three times: for the short story "Poison in the Cup", for "Twist for Twist" and for a non-fiction work on a case from a Scottish murder, Heavens Knows Who (1960). Brand is also the author of the series of stories for children Matilda the Nurse.

Edgar Allan Poe

2021-10-20 06:39:53 UTC

(Boston, United States, 19th January 1809 - Baltimore, United States, 7th October 1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was a famous writer, poet, crític and romantic journalist,recognized as one of the bests writing short stories.
He was specially remembered for his tales of terror.
He is considerated the inventor of the crime stories and he has done also some science ficción stories.

He was baptised Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts, and his parents died when he was a child. He spent one academic year at the University of Virginia and later enlisted, also briefly, in the army. His literary career began with a book of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems .

For financial reasons, he soon turned his efforts to prose, writing short stories and literary criticism for some newspapers of the time; he became known for his caustic and elegant style. In Baltimore in 1835, he married his cousin Virginia Clemm, who was thirteen years old at the time. His wife died of tuberculosis two years later.

He died on 7 October 1849, in the city of Baltimore, when he was barely forty years old. The exact cause of his death has never been clarified. It was attributed to alcohol, cerebral congestion, cholera, drugs, heart failure, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis and other causes.

Poe also made forays into fields as heterogeneous as cosmology, cryptography and mesmerism. His work has been assimilated by popular culture through literature, music, both modern and classical, cinema, comics, painting and television.

Edgar Allan Poe's best books
-The Arthur Gordon Pym Narrative
-The Black Cat
-The Golden Beetle
-The Raven
-The Complete Stories

Curiosities:
-He was adicted to the drugs and the alcohol.
-He was quite strong and athletic.
-He never had a very good economy.
-He got married with his 13 years old cousin Virgina Clemm.
-He studied in UK.
-His father abandoned him very early

Phyllis Dorothy James

2021-10-20 06:50:41 UTC

Biography:

Phyllis Dorothy James White, born August 3, 1920 and passed away on November 27, 2014.
Who is she? She is a British mystery novelist best known for her fictional detective Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard.

What did she do?
She became a civil servant in the penal section of the Department of the Interior.

When did she start?
Her first mystery novel is Cover Her Face (1962).
In addition, James earned the nickname "Queen of Crime."

Curious things:

She went to prison to interview the prisoners and to do some literature projects with all of them. Since she was a child she told to her brothers and sisters imaginative stories because others writers told her to do it and she just described herself and what she felt to them. Considered one of the great ladies of crime, P.D. James dedicated her literary career.
His memoir, Time to Be in Earnest, was published in 2000.

Novels:

Several of his novels were adapted for television.

Interview:

https://youtu.be/p5B98_8H624

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

2021-10-20 06:50:49 UTC

Davis was born in Chicago in 1916 and raised in Illinois by Margaret (Greer) and Alfred J. Salisbury.

She worked in Chicago in adverstising as a research liberarian and as an edition of the merchandaiser, prior to taking up fiction writing. She was married to Harry Davis, the character actor, from 1946 until his death in 1993. She published many novels and shorts stories. Her novels explore psychological suspense, as was popular for many decades. She was nominated for an Edgard Award eight times, served as President of the Mystery Writers of America in 1956 and was declared a Grand Master by that organization in 1985.

Davis died on August 3, 2014, at a senior residence facility in Palisades, New York. She had been in failing health for several months prior to her death at the age of 98

Notable works:
A gentle murderer (1951)
A town of Masks (1952, repint edition,2001)
Black Sheep, White Lamb (1964)

Link video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IfrvX5LIXpU

Agatha Christie

2021-10-21 11:50:46 UTC

She's a crime novelist and author from 1890. Her most popular works are "Murder on the Orient Express", "The Mousetrap", "Death on the Nile", "The murder of Roger Ackroyd" and "The mysterious affair at Styles ".

Biography:
She was born on the 15th of September in Torquay in 1890 and died the 12th of January in 1976 in Wallingford. She was born with the name of Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller and later was called Agatha Christie after marrying her first husband.
After marrying her second husband, Max Mallowman, they went to a couple trips in Irak and other countries like Syria where she got inspiration to create stories for three of her other novels.

Important facts:

She had a pseudonym called Mary Westmacott to be able to write romance novels without people buying them just because of her fame.

She's also the author that has sold the most copies of her works and third in relation to the better sold books of all times, just behind those of William Shakespeare and the Bible.

In 1926, because of a supposed depression, she disappeared completely and was later found in a hotel eleven days after her dissapearence with a possible case of amnesia.

Trailer of "Murder on the Orient Express":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq4m3yAoW8E