The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

LINDA BARNES (b. 1949)

Before Detroit native and longtime Boston resident Linda Barnes created her semi-tough female private eye Carlotta Carlyle, she worked as a theatre instructor and director in Massachusetts high schools and wrote two one-act plays and four whodunits featuring the actor-sleuth Michael Spraggue. While her first four mysteries were successful, it was the 6-foot-1, red-haired, taxi-driving Carlyle who really put Barnes on the map.

The Spraggue books were written in the British tradition of the dilettante sleuth who has the money, and thus the free time, to help a group of friends who are being threatened or done in at a statistically improbable rate. Spraggue, while identified with Boston, also travels to the California wine country in «Bitter Finish» and to New Orleans in «Cities of the Dead,» thereby indulging his creator's passions for wine and Cajun cooking, respectively. Perhaps his most memorable Boston appearance entails running down a killer during the Boston Marathon. Like the other Spraggue books, the action and solutions to the crimes depend more on the situation than on character.

Carlyle's first appearance, in the short story «Lucky Penny,» shows Barnes utilising her theatre background in order to portray character through internal monologues and wisecracking dialogue. It also sets the stage, complete with Boston backdrop, for the six novels to date in which Carlyle plays the lead among a cast of characters that includes her erstwhile colleague and would-be lover, Lieutenant Mooney, and Gloria, the wheelchair-bound late-night taxi dispatcher.

Like her colleagues in crime Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski, Carlyle pursues personal relationships along with her cases, and even when she doesn't know her clients and villains at the start of an adventure, she often becomes intimately acquainted with them-sometimes physically-before the solution is reached. Says Barnes, "I am not Carlotta even if we do share some characteristics. We both play blues guitar when we need to think. She plays better than I do. But then I have much better taste in men!"