Murder’s No Mystery to Her

Your boss is giving you a headache. The kids are screaming. Your spouse has three problems that need solving now .

It’s time to escape . . .

To a world where corpses turn up in bathtubs, where an inventor disappears after his girlfriend is shot to death, and natural deaths are anything but.

It’s the world of the murder mystery, which Collections Manager Kathleen Sullivan of the Thousand Oaks City Library will explore--in depth--tonight at the Glendale Library.

Sullivan concedes that some books get pretty violent, for example, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series.

“But the fact is, these (characters) are doing something about the bad guys,” something a lot of us would like to do but can’t, she said.

The mystery, Sullivan said, “is usually involved with good and evil, and good usually triumphs. And with a mystery, the resolution is almost guaranteed.”

*

Well, exactly whodunit isn’t guaranteed, but, by the last page, that person usually faces justice of one sort or another.

“I do not think that reading for escape is a bad thing,” Sullivan said. “I get very worried about people who only listen to talk radio and (watch) important TV shows. Every important writer of the 20th Century read mysteries and enjoyed them. There’s something to be said for escape and books.”

Sullivan, a hard-core mystery fan since her late teens, first gave her talk on mysteries in 1982 to help Ventura County librarians familiarize themselves with the genre. She updated the material and began giving the talk again last April. She said she has made four or five presentations since then. Tonight’s begins at 7, in the Central Library Auditorium, 222 E. Harvard St., and it’s free.

P.S. The stiff in the tub is from “Whose Body?” by Dorothy L. Sayers. The disappearing inventor was “The Thin Man” in the title of Dashiell Hammett’s novel. And the genre is loaded with seemingly natural demises.