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).