Clues and Corpses

Clues and Corpses investigates the life and genre writing of Oklahoma Choctaw detective novelist Todd Downing (1902-1974). Included in this volume are nearly 300 annotated mystery book reviews from the 1930s by Downing and Downing's essay "Murder is a Rather Serious Business" (1943), as well as analysis of Downing's own detective fiction, most of which is set in Mexico. Curtis Evans, Ph.D. is the author of The Conquest of Labor: Daniel Pratt and Southern Industrialization (LSU Press, 2001), winner of the Bennett H. Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association, and Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961 (McFarland Press, 2012). He has written extensively about crime and mystery fiction for CADS: Crime and Detective Stories and Mystery*File and also at his own blog, The Passing Tramp (thepassingtramp.blogspot.com).