Are the Red Sox dead? Even Minnesota has been beating them.
But never say never. The Red Sox know from miracles and mysteries. The corpses have been piling up for years in novels set at Fenway.
Here are ten morbid fictions where red is not just the color of sox. The ones I’ve actually read, I’ve commented upon. The others I hope to get to in the post-season, since I’m unlikely to be listening to ballgames then.
1. Murder at Fenway Park by Troy Soos. Set in 1912.
2. Killing the Curse by Jeff Stratton
3. Green Monster by Rick Shefchik.
4. Dirty Water: A Red Sox Mystery By Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and Jere Smith.
Connecticut-based novelist and memoirist Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and her son Jere, both diehard Red Sox fans, concocted this thriller where the ballpark is more than a backdrop for murder. The story is packed with team trivia and shows serious love for the Sox.
5. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King. The only book on this list to be adapted as a pop-up book, King’s touching and harrowing adventure of a young girl lost in the woods is informed by a universal symbol of social connectedness—listening to a ball game on the radio.
6. Fear in Fenway by Crabbe Evers. The cover of this murder mystery, part of a whole baseball-themed series, features a skeleton sitting, grinning spectrally, in the stands. Not an uncommon sight around the seventh inning of many games, to be sure. The story isn’t as horrorstruck as that cover suggests, and the best parts of it are really the baseball-history bits.
7. Best Bet in Beantown, Squeeze Play in Beantown, Foul Ball in Beantown and Double Play in Beantown; Will Beaman mysteries by G.S. Rowe
8. Harvey Blissberg mysteries by Richard Rosen.
9. Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker. Casual Red Sox references are plentiful in Parker’s Spenser series. This one actually has a character who pitches for the team.
10. Strike Three, You’re Dead by Richard Rosen. Actually, protagonist Harvey Blissberg is a FORMER Red Sox player; in this novel’s he’s helping out the Providence Jewels.