The year was 1989, I lived in a small Texas
town and I perused the local library for mysteries to read. Suddenly one
afternoon I spotted an intriguing title Death in Zanzibar by M.M. Kaye,
an author I had never read. And a "faraway place with a strange sounding
name" could not be ignored.
Fast forward to four years ago when I started a
blog series titled Hooked from the Start and the fifth and last blog dealt
mainly with first lines. I don't know why I put the series on hold but I did
mention that Part Six would deal with titles, especially Death in Zanzibar by
M.M. Kaye (M.M. stands for Mary Margaret). Obviously, I intended to continue the
series but life got in the way and I forgot all about it. Hopefully now I'm back
on track.
Yes, I am a great lover of mysteries and of far
away places and six of Ms. Kaye's books began with "Death in...." a faraway
place. I read most of those books in
1989 and read one right after another. Later I discovered that not all of these
titles originally began with "Death in" and must have been changed to indicate a
continuity of sorts. She and her military husband moved 27 times and she used
some of the places as inspiration for her novels.
I learned, by reading her biography on Wikipedia,
that she was born in India and her father was an intelligence officer in the
Indian Army. Her grandfather, brother and husband all served in the British Raj,
which was the rule of the British Crown in the Indian subcontinent between 1858
and 1947. Death in Zanzibar was the first of her mysteries that I read and as I
said, I was hooked. The novels that I read next were all Death in a faraway
place: Kashmir, Berlin, Cyprus, Kenya, the Andamans. She wrote other novels also
but her most famous novel was The Far Pavilions.
In 1989 a public library was my sanctuary to search for mysteries. And certainly a series that began with
"Death in..." suggested mystery. I discovered a lot of mystery writers that year
just from browsing through titles. Of course the Internet later made it a lot
easier to find mysteries or any genre, for that matter.
Part Seven in this series will continue not with titles or first lines but with blurbs that caught my attention.
