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I'm pleased to announce that my three mystery-trivia books have been updated and reissued by
The latest: The Alfred Hitchcock Triviography and Quiz Book and The Sherlock Holmes Triviography and Quiz Book are both finalists for the EPIC Award in nonfiction.
The Alfred Hitchcock Triviography and Quiz Book
From his director’s chair, Alfred Hitchcock shot scenes using national monuments, museums, and landmarks as his settings. His remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much had James Stewart and Doris Day racing through Albert Hall. Kim Novak attempted suicide by jumping into San Francisco Bay below the Golden Gate Bridge in Vertigo. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint scampered across Thomas Jefferson’s face in a replica of Mount Rushmore in the climax scene in North by Northwest. Robert Cummings and Norman Fry confronted each other at the top of the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur. And Grace Kelly and Cary Grant engaged in one of the most sensuous love scenes in film history in a shot overlooking the French Riviera in To Catch a Thief.
Hitchcock's filming forte lay in his creative ability with the camera, creating scenes in the most unlikely places. The film Lifeboat was shot in a single confined set—an actual lifeboat. The thriller Rope was filmed in a small apartment in eleven long, continuous shots. The walls were built on rollers and slide away from the camera as it followed the actors around the apartment. Rear Window, makes us voyeurs into the private lives of people living in a next-door apartment building. And finally, we are transported to a shabby motel to view a gruesome murder in a shower in what became Hitchcock’s most popular film, Psycho.
The
Sherlock Holmes Triviography and Quiz Book
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson ventured through the streets of London
from the wealthy Hyde Park district to the opium dens in the seedy side of
town, and out to the moors in Dartmore. But most of Holmes’ adventures begin at
his flat, 221 B Baker Street where bookshelves are filled with reference books
and scrapbooks of newspaper clippings; a bearskin rugs lays in front of the
fireplace, a chemistry lab is tucked away in one corner, and a table dressed
with a tea service in another. The fireplace mantel is cluttered with his pipe,
gold snuffbox, a wooden box with a secret chamber, binoculars; and letters of
interest are impaled with a knife. On his desks sit another pipe, his
magnifying glass, and a framed photo of Irene Adler who fans have come to know
as “the woman.”
The Agatha Christie Triviography
and Quiz Book
Agatha
Christie spun tales of murder for six decades. From the 1920s to the 1970s, she
transported her readers to quaint English villages, down the busy streets of
London, into the libraries of stately country mansions, and to exotic locales
in the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and the entire European continent.
Despite the vastness of her settings, most of Christie’s murders can be
described as locked-room scenarios; the murder committed in confined,
inescapable places: isolated islands, aboard airplanes, trains, and boats.
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