Margaret Marron

Margaret Marron

Margaret Maron (born before 1981) is an American crime writer .

Life

Maron grew up in North Carolina near Raleigh on a small tobacco farm that has been in the family for over 100 years. After attending college for two years, she met her husband, Joe Maron, who was a naval officer and later artist, while doing a summer job at the United States Department of Defense . She dropped out of college, lived with her husband for a while in Italy and then returned with him to his home in Brooklyn . According to her own statements, however, she soon got homesick and managed to convince her family, which had now grown to include a son, to live in the country. So she returned with her family to the farm of her childhood, where she still lives today.

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By his own admission, Maron had had a desire to write from an early age. At first she wrote poetry , but quickly realized that her real talent lies in the field of prose . So she soon switched to writing short stories . She found the form of the detective novel because the market for short stories was oversaturated in the 1970s.

To date, Maron has written numerous short stories and over 20 detective novels, most of which are based on her own life experiences. Her work focuses on two characters: Lieutenant Sigrid Harald, an idiosyncratic policewoman from the New York City Police Department , whose father was killed when she was a child, works in the New York art scene (Sigrid Harald series). The crime novels around the character of the no less stubborn district attorney and judge Deborah Knott, daughter of a whiskey smuggler who was notorious during Prohibition and the youngest sister of eleven "big brothers", are set in the fictional Colleton County in North Carolina and address topics from the changing southern states on, such as the changing role of women, the status of homosexuals or the increasing industrialization of a rural region that until recently was dominated by agriculture (Deborah Knott series).

Characteristic of Maron's style are less action-packed arcs of tension than empathetic and at times humorous descriptions of the milieu. In her home country she is considered an outstanding representative of contemporary southern literature.

Numerous crime novels and short stories by Maron have been translated into other languages, but only a few into German.

Awards

Her first crime novel in the Deborah Knott series, Bootlegger's Daughter (dt. The Shadows of the South ), was awarded numerous prizes, including a. with the Edgar Award , the Agatha Award and the Macavity Award and was on the Washington Post bestseller list in 1992/1993 . Many other earlier and later works by Margaret Maron have also received awards, such as For example, the 2000 crime novel Storm Track in the Deborah Knott series won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the Best Novel of the Year in 2004.

Margaret Maron was a founding member of the Sisters in Crime , which she chaired from 1989 to 1990. From 2005 to 2006 she was Chair of the Mystery Writers of America . In addition, she has exercised a number of other relevant functions and offices.

Works

Sigrid Harald series:

• One Coffee With (1981)
• Death of a Butterfly (1984)
• Death in Blue Folders (1985)
• The Right Jack (1987)
• Baby Doll Games (1988)
• Corpus Christmas (1989)
• Past Imperfect (1991)
• Fugitive Colors (1995)

Deborah Knott Series:

• Bootlegger's Daughter (1992) ( The Shadows of the South , Econ 1994)
• Southern Discomfort (1993) (German creeping poison , Econ 1995)
• Shooting at Loons (1994) (German steps on the beach , Econ 1996)
• Up Jumps the Devil (1996)
• Killer Market (1997)
• Home Fires (1998)
• Storm Track (2000)
• Uncommon Clay (2001)
• Slow Dollar (2002)
• High Country Fall (2004)
• Rituals of the Season (2005)
• Winter's Child (2006)
• Hard Row (2007)
• Death's Half-Acre (2008)
• Sand Sharks (2009)
• Christmas Mourning (2010)
• Three-Day Town (2011)
• The Buzzard Table (2012)

Other works:

• Bloody Kin (1985) (the first work to be set in the fictional "Colleton County")
• Shoveling Smoke (1997) (short story collection)
• Last Lessons of Summer (2003)
• Suitable for Hanging (2004) (further collection of short stories)

Web links

• Margaret Maron Homepage (English)