Crime Fiction on a EuroPass - Ancient & Modern Greece

Opa!

Every time someone orders flaming saganaki in a Greek restaurant out here in Chicago the entire restaurant shouts out "Opa!" I think this is something oddly peculiar to Greek restaurants in the Windy City, especially if you happen to be eating at The Parthenon, a 40 year old restaurant in GreekTown where the dish of cheese set on fire originated. Anyway, I couldn't resist that since we're in Greece this week for the EuroPass Challenge sponsored by Mysteries in Paradise. For your reading pleasure I have found a few books set in both ancient and modern Greece.

Gladys Mitchell wrote two books set in Greece. They are slightly related to each other. First is Come Away, Death (1937) which takes Mrs. Bradley on a tour of Greece along with twelve others including the tour host Sir Rudri Hopkinson who plans to recreate rituals at the ruined temples in hopes of summoning the goddess Demeter. Mysterious happenings with a statue, poisonous vipers, blood sacrifice and a severed head all play a part in this typically odd detective story from the eccentric Gladys Mitchell and her equally eccentric psychiatrist sleuth Dame Beatrice Bradley.

Over forty years later Mitchell returned to Greece in Lament for Leto (1971). As with Christie who re-used a character from At Bertram's Hotel in her later book Nemesis, Mitchell recycles a character from Come Away, Death. It is Ronald Dick (one of the travelers in the earlier book) who fortuitously runs into Mrs. Bradley. He tells her he is organizing another tour of the islands this time as a cruise. Mrs. Bradley agrees to join his group and no sooner are they at sea then strange events take place. There is a jewelry theft on board ship and later the body of a woman is found at the foot of the sea cliff known as Sappho's Leap. Mrs. Bradley does her usual inimitable turn as detective to reveal the culprit.

For those who enjoy historical mysteries I can highly recommend the trio of books by Paul Doherty which feature Alexander the Great and his physician/advisor Telemon. I previously reviewed at length the second book The Godless Man which you can read here. Each of the books features at least one impossible crime and sometimes also a locked room mystery. There are multiple crimes committed by various gruesome means. Often the books will have more than one murderer at work. It is war time and there is much skulduggery and espionage working their insidious way into the intricate, sometimes complex, but thoroughly engaging stories.

In the first book, The House of Death, Telemon must discover the identity of a mysterious killer who leaves behind puzzling messages alluding to passages in The Iliad and the playwright Euripides. The Godless Man is similar with a master spy calling himself The Centaur plaguing Ephesus with killings. The last book, The Gates of Hell, takes place during Alexander's siege of Halicarnasus and involves the search for a manuscript in code that holds the key to a hidden treasure and the secret to capturing the city. Of course, several murders occur throughout the story including one committed in a sealed and haunted room. I like this series, but they may not be for readers who shy away from books with high body counts and graphically described murders and violence. War ain't a pretty thing, my friends, and it was nastier than Hell in ancient times according to Doherty.