Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar founded Avalanche shortly after they met in 1968. At the time, Sharp was a New York-based independent curator and Béar an underground magazine editor who had recently moved to New York from London. They published the first issue in 1970 and collaborated on 13 issues from 1970 to 1976. Avalanche focused on art from the perspective of artists rather than critics, and investigated new forms of art that were developing in the U.S. and Europe with probing interviews, extensive use of photography and dynamic layouts. For many artists, publication in Avalanche preceded a one-person gallery or museum show. Aside from an eight-page news section, the editorial content included only interviews, artists' texts and documents of art and art making. All interviews were conducted by Sharp, Béar or done jointly. Among the featured artists were Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Philip Glass, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Yvonne Rainer, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner and Jackie Winsor. This boxed facsimile edition of Avalanche's complete run reproduces the first eight issues individually, and the final five in a single newsprint paperback.

Avalanche

Arts & Photography

Sharp, Willoughby

Bear, Liza

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Primary Information

While placidly pedaling his bicycle on the morning before Easter, Constable Simmons, a twenty-year veteran of the Bermuda Police Force, discovers a beautiful woman's lifeless body on Snake Road. She has been stabbed to death. Incongruously, a bouquet of lilies lies by her side. From this slender clue of the Easter lilies an intricately interlaced murder problem quickly blossoms in Bermuda. Soon another person, a man this time, is found dead in Hamilton, the territorial capital. He has been struck down by mercury bichloride. Can the intrepid Bermuda Police Force send Death, a most unwelcome visitor, packing, before a third victim is found? A pioneering police procedural crime novel, Willoughby Sharp's Murder in Bermuda focuses not on the investigative activities of a solitary super-detective, but rather on those of several ordinary policemen. The author, who at the time he wrote the novel lived with his family in Bermuda, also presents his readers with appealing local color and a tricky, fair play problem that is in the best tradition of Golden Age detective fiction. Originally published in 1933, Murder in Bermuda provides readers with, as a contemporary reviewer stated, "as complicated and satisfying a mystery as one could hope to find."

Murder in Bermuda

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Coachwhip Publications

Murder at the New York Stock Exchange! And not just one dead stockbroker but two! Both men, it is soon learned, were mysteriously poisoned, much to the irritation of the man in charge of the case, the sardonic Inspector Bullock. "Don't tell me it's a strange, oriental poison known only to the high priests of an obscure tribe in the upper Himalayas," he wisecracks. "Don't tell me that, 'cause I'm way behind on my Fu-Manchu stories." Inspector Bullock scoffs at Great Detectives like Philo Vance and Drury Lane ("those mincing, namby-pamby, know-it-alls"), but he soon finds himself confronting one of those fiendishly complicated murder problems that so delight fans of Golden Age detective fiction. Willoughby Sharp, the son of a stockbroker who in the 1890s had clerked for J. P. Morgan, had himself held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange between 1925 and 1931 and knew his subject down to the ground. This authentic background knowledge greatly enriches Murder of the Honest Broker, as does the author's "sharp" sense of humor and his deftness at constructing an ingenious murder puzzle. "An amusing yarn and a puzzling one," declared the New York Times Book Review back in 1934, when the novel was originally published. Modern readers will surely agree. 
Additional mysteries available from CoachwhipBooks.com.

Murder of the Honest Broker

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