Library Recommendation: M. D. Lake (aka Allen Simpson)

By Faye Herold, Library Committee
Originally published in the July 2020 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

​Hello, you! Have you recently moved in? You’ve been here twenty years? Are you looking for a well-plotted whodunit in a familiar setting? You may not have noticed among the mysteries on third floor a number of small paperbacks by M .D. Lake, author of ten clever mysteries written under the persona of Peggy O’Neill, bikeriding University of Minnesota campus cop with a preference for the night shift. Peggy is adept at finding corpses, usually in a slightly-disguised building on campus.

My favorite, Midsummer Malice, centers around the university Showboat and involves the theater’s piano player, an adoption, a hippy who sells beads out of ​a bus, and, of course, a murder or two. Surely a familiar location for us all is the river that separates what Peggy calls the Old Campus from the New Campus.

​These are “pure straightforward myster[ies] sure to appeal to those who prefer a puzzle to mindless violence” (Rave Review). Besides the puzzle of 

who-done-it, there is the puzzle of identifying settings, and maybe even characters in disguise. We are the perfect audience.

Many of you may know that M. D. Lake is really our own neighbor Allen Simpson! This was a delightful surprise to me. Allen once wrote a weekly humor column in the Minnesota Daily. Retired from teaching Scandinavian literature at the U, he moved to 1666 Coffman in 2009. You can find his bio in the notebooks on the 1666 shelf.