Charlaine Harris

Mystery writer Charlaine Harris was born November 25, 1951, in Tunica, Mississippi. She received a B.A. from Southwestern at Memphis in 1973, and she worked at newspapers in Clarkesdale and Greenville, Mississippi, before her first novel, Sweet and Deadly, was published in 1980. The novel concerns the efforts of a journalist to solve the mystery of the murder of her parents in a small southern town. She followed that novel with A Secret Rage in 1984. With Real Murders in 1990 and A Bone to Pick in 1992, Harris initiated a successful series of mysteries featuring Aurora Teagarden, a librarian and amateur detective who returns to her home town in Georgia. She would be featured in a number of later novels, including Three Bedrooms, One Corpse (1994), The Julius House (1995), Dead over Heels (1996), A Fool and His Honey (1999), and most recently, Last Scene Alive (2002).

In 1996, Harris began a new mystery series, this time set in Shakespeare, Arkansas, and featuring Lily Baird, a cleaning lady with a first-rate education but physically and emotional scarred by a savage attack years earlier. In the first novel of this series, Shakespeare’s Landlord, Lily witnesses the disposal of a dead body. By careful questioning of her clients, Lily begins to piece together the answer to the mystery, but she is also being stalked by someone wishing to do her harm.

Lily Baird continued to solve mysteries in subsequent books in the series: Shakespeare’s Champion (1997), Shakespeare’s Christmas (1998), and Shakespeare’s Trollop (2000). The plots of her mysteries are generally well reviewed, but some critics have took special note of the unique character of Lily Baird, who one reviewer called “one of the best-drawn and most compelling characters in contemporary mystery fiction—complex, smart, streetwise, tough.”

In 2001, Harris began yet another series, this time delving into the supernatural with The Southern Vampires Series: Dead Until Dark (2001) and Living Dead in Dallas (2002).

(Article first posted April 2002)

Related Links & Info

This page from The Best Reviews features reviews of several recent works by Harris.