Meet Aaron Elkins, the father of the contemporary forensic crime fiction novel, at a rare public appearance on Friday August 13, 2010, 6pm at Bookwagon New and Used Books, 1652 Ashland Street in Ashland, Oregon. You can pick up Aaron Elkins’ mysteries at Bookwagon.
Elkins’ latest is Skull Duggery, published by Penguin in 2009. Gideon Oliver, The Skeleton Detective, is on vacation in Mexico and is called in to assist the locals when a mummified body is found in the desert. Gideon’s calm professionalism, his insight and his tendency to teach and explain make what might be a gruesome discipline into an exercise in detection.
Skull Duggery is the 16th Gideon Oliver mystery, a series that began in 1982 with the Fellowship of Fear. Aaron Elkins was way ahead of Patricia Cornwell (Postmortem, 1990), before CSI and before Bones. Elkins is considered the father of contemporary forensic crime fiction, having picked up the mantle of 1930s British writer, Richard Freeman. Freeman’s character, Dr. John Thorndyke, was a doctor, lawyer and expert in medical jurisprudence and carried on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s earlier tradition of Sherlock Holmes. The evolution of the genre has also been a systematic progression from intuition to science.
When Fellowship of Fear burst onto the publishing scene in 1982, it established a new genre of crime fiction, and was hailed by Library Journal as “ingenious and original.” The Houston Post raved, “At last a new detective has come along that looks to small clues, however inanimate…” In Fellowship of Fear, Gideon astounds his colleagues when he identifies a victim as left handed, Asian, male, 148 pounds and 5’2″– with just a couple of teeth and a bone fragment. In Make No Bones (Mysterious Press, 1991) Gideon uses clay to reconstruct the face of long buried victim. His colleagues, older and more conventional academic physical anthropologists, look on with distain and disbelief, distrusting this new investigative technique.
The long dead and the newly dead often meet thanks to Gideon Oliver, The Skeleton Detective. Unnatural Selection (Penguin, 2006) finds Gideon in Cornwall, where he finds a not-so-Neolithic bone that as often happens, predicts a very contemporary murder. And in Little Tiny Teeth (Berkeley, 2007), the seething tropical heat of the Amazon give rise to poisonous spiders, intoxicating plants, shrunken heads and heads only recently dead.
Where other forensic investigators might depend on 3D image reconstruction holography, hyperspectral imaging systems, parallel processing and DNA analysis, Gideon uses his amazing insights and talent for close examination. Out in the field and in primitive conditions, he must depend on experience and scientific observation. Today in 2010, Gideon’s voice is just as familiar and as loved as it was in 1982: witty, sometimes sardonic and always intelligent.
Aaron Elkins won an Edgar for Old Bones, his 1988 breakout novel, and later an Agatha (with Charlotte, his wife) and the Nero Wolfe Award. No stranger to science, Aaron Elkins has taught physical anthropology at the university level, and has spent countless hours with medical examiners, police and criminalists. He’s traveled widely, and each of the Gideon Oliver books is set in a new exotic location, and filled with the food, customs, physiognomy and linguistics of that place.
Elkins has also written the Chris Norgren series featuring art crimes and with his wife Charlotte Elkins, a series featuring LPGA golfer Lee Ofsted. Charlotte Elkins will join her husband at the August 13th event at Bookwagon.
Aaron Elkins’ visit to Ashland has been organized by the Ashland Mystery Readers Group and is sponsored by Friends of the Ashland Public Library, Bookwagon New and Used Books and Standing Stone Brewing Company. The event is free and open to the public.
For more information on Aaron Elkins’ visit to Ashland, Oregon call Bookwagon at 541-488-4477 or visit www.AshlandMystery.com For more information on Aaron Elkins, visit www.AaronElkins.com
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