It is 330 B. C. The Macedonian Alexander the Great has conquered Asia Minor but now his armies are far from Athens, and those who support Athenian independence are beginning to chafe and plot against him. Foreigners, like Aristotle, and those suspected of befriending foreigners, such as Stephanos, are threatened. A series of threats persuade these two that they will be best served quitting the mainland for a while and so they both find suitable excuses: Aristotle has to transport a sick student home to Rhodos, while Stephanos must find a relative of his bride-to-be Philomela to clear up an inheritance dispute. With a varied cast of travellers they set sail across the Aegean to the sacred Isle of Delos, to Mykonos and beyond to the coast of Asia Minor. There they will soon be embroiled in investigating conspiracy and murder. But first they must survive life on the high seas where storms and piracy honour no man, least of all the greatest philosopher who has ever lived.

Secrets Of Life, The

Doody, Margaret

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Arrow

Stephanos and his teacher, the philosopher Aristotle, are drawn into solving the perplexing abduction case of Anthia, the heiress of a prominent silver merchant. Someone has snatched her from her home, but no one knows the motive All that is known is that the abductor and the heiress are on the road to Delphi, and a murderer is following them close behind. The identity of the abductor and the murderer are mysteries that only Aristotle, with the aid of the Delphian oracle, will be able to solve.

Aristotle and Poetic Justice: Murder and Mystery in Ancient Athens

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Murder and mayhem may seem like unreasonable company for Aristotle, one of the founding minds of Western philosophy. But in the skilled hands of Margaret Doody, the pairing could not be more logical. With her Aristotle Detective novels, Margaret Doody brings a Holmesian hero to the bloodied streets of ancient Greece, trading the pipe and deerstalker of Sherlock for the woolen chiton and sandals of Aristotle. Replete with suspense, historical detail, and humor, and complemented by an ever-growing cast of characters and vivid descriptions of the ancient world, Doody’s mysteries are as much lively takes on the figures and forms of the classics as they are classic whodunits in their own right. In Aristotle Detective, we first meet Stephanos—naive Watson to Aristotle’s learned Holmes—a young landed Athenian and student of Aristotle. With the aid of his cunning, olive-loving teacher, Stephanos must clear his exiled cousin of murder and save his family’s honor in a tense public trial. Will Stephanos survive to cinch the case?

Aristotle Detective: An Aristotle Detective Novel

Humor & Satire

University of Chicago Press

Murder and mayhem may seem like unreasonable company for Aristotle, one of the founding minds of Western philosophy. But in the skilled hands of Margaret Doody, the pairing could not be more logical. With her Aristotle Detective novels, Margaret Doody brings a Holmesian hero to the bloodied streets of ancient Greece, trading the pipe and deerstalker of Sherlock for the woolen chiton and sandals of Aristotle. Replete with suspense, historical detail, and humor, and complemented by an ever-growing cast of characters and vivid descriptions of the ancient world, Doody’s mysteries are as much lively takes on the figures and forms of the classics as they are classic whodunits in their own right. Stephanos and his teacher return in Aristotle and Poetic Justice, when a party given by wealthy Athenian silver miners leads to kidnapping, a ghost, a road trip to Delphi, and, of course, murder. More historical fiction than a detective novel, this sequel runs the gamut of Athenian social customs, myth, politics, and economics—from the trials of virgin love to the dangers of silver lust.

Aristotle and Poetic Justice: An Aristotle Detective Novel

Murder and mayhem may seem like unreasonable company for Aristotle, one of the founding minds of Western philosophy. But in the skilled hands of Margaret Doody, the pairing could not be more logical. With her Aristotle Detective novels, Margaret Doody brings a Holmesian hero to the bloodied streets of ancient Greece, trading the pipe and deerstalker of Sherlock for the woolen chiton and sandals of Aristotle. Replete with suspense, historical detail, and humor, and complemented by an ever-growing cast of characters and vivid descriptions of the ancient world, Doody’s mysteries are as much lively takes on the figures and forms of the classics as they are classic whodunits in their own right. With Aristotle and the Secrets of Life, tensions between the Athenians and the Makedonians—followers of another of Aristotle’s former students, Alexander the Great—draw our heroes across the Aegean Sea. Even as Aristotle and Stephanos escape from pirates, uncover conspiracy, and face the horrors of war, Aristotle finds time to discuss his studies of the natural world in this gripping tale of their quest into darkness.

Aristotle and the Secrets of Life: An Aristotle Detective Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

In Jane Austen’s works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seems: according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a “big cheese”―the moon’s reflection on the water’s surface. It worked. In Jane Austen’s Names, Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places―real and imaginary―in Austen’s fiction. Austen’s creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen’s names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen’s technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism―in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency. Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, Jane Austen’s Names will revolutionize how we read Austen’s fiction.

Jane Austen's Names: Riddles, Persons, Places

Aristotle Detective

Mystery

Black Dagger Crime

Named one of the "Big Ten Outstanding Books from University Presses for 2006" by ForeWord magazine
For Margaret Doody, Venice, poised between East and West, earth and sea, sacred and profane, occupies a place only its own. Appearances confound. Renaissance ladies achieved their blond beauty by crimping and dyeing their hair in urine. The richly ornamented facades of its buildings mask lighter structures based on wood pilings ultimately floating on clay and water. Marble is intimate with mud. In Doody's Venice, the holy is never far from the sensual, the earthy and carnal. Though the city's patron is one of the four Evangelists, enshrined in the glorious basilica that bears his name, she reminds us that according to legend the body of Saint Mark was transported to Venice hidden in a mound of pork.
With a novelist's eye for quirky anecdote and rich detail, with a connoisseur's eye for the secrets hidden in the cut of a sleeve or the corner of a painting, Doody summons the Venice of Carpaccio, Titian, and Canaletto, of Goldoni and Casanova. She draws on comments from the myriad travelers, contented or grumbling, from the Middle Ages to the present, men and women who have by turns been seduced and disturbed by the city. If she is hard-pressed to find a single golden age in Venetian history, she has no difficulty in locating the city's low point in the tragic nineteenth century. When the once proudly independent republic fell to a foreign power, its joy largely ceased, and it became the melancholy and somewhat sinister place evoked in the writings of Byron, George Sand, Gautier, Dickens, and others. Venice as death's city persists into the twentieth century in the works of Henry James and Thomas Mann. Only in the twenty-first century, she suggests, might we escape that dark nineteenth-century vision of a city once associated with glowing color and joyful music.
Bride of the Adriatic, a city of golden light and shimmering reflection rising out of seaweed and slime, Venice has long held travelers and dreamers, rogues, painters, and writers in its sway. Why are we so drawn to the place? What would be lost were Venice to cease to exist? In Tropic of Venice Doody explores the multiple ways in which this is a perturbingly exciting and unique city—and a place that simultaneously unsettles and reveals many of our most deeply rooted cultural values.

Tropic of Venice (Personal Takes)

History & Criticism

University of Pennsylvania Press

It is the autumn of 330 BC, and three law cases are exciting Athens: the malicious wounding of a wealthy citizen; a bizarre murder by hemlock; and an accusation of impiety against the courtesan Phryne. The court proceedings and surrounding speculation stir up strong feelings: disgust for depraved sensuality and deep political passions amongst the city’s populace. A crucial lack of judgement eventually brings affairs to a boiling point.Aristotle, recollecting the death of Socrates and strongly aware of the city’s tensions and of the fragile nature of political constitutions, intervenes, lest the forthcoming trials break Athens into fragments.From the Paperback edition.

Poison in Athens

Century

This is the follow-up to the adventures of Stephanos and his teacher, the philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle has settled down into a sexual relationship with the slave Herpyllis, and Stephanos has married Philomela, the daughter of landowner Smikrenes, and is trying to establish his political position as an Athenian. However, Stephanos is finding the happiness of his marriage is marred by some vexatious lawsuits: one from a neighbour of his in-laws in the Hymettos property, another from the father of the girl he was once supposed to marry. It is 329BC and a series of thefts (some comic, some sinister) puzzles Athens. They seem to have some connection with a little shop that makes statuettes of Demeter and Kore. Stephanos and Philomela decide to become initiates of Demeter and persuade Aristotle to join them. Their connection with the Mysteries at Eleusis allows them the chance to observe some phenomena that don’t add up. The climax to it all comes during the celebration of the Mysteries at Eleusis when they have enough evidence to pin some important thefts and a murder on personages closely connected with the Mysteries.

Mysteries in Eleusis: Aristotle Detective Mystery

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Books by Doody, Margaret