9/10/1989 The icy clutches of Aaron Elkins

September 10, 1989.  On this day the action begins in Aaron Elkins' sixth novel about anthropologist and bone expert Gideon Oliver.  Icy Clutches involves three scientific researchers who died in an avalanche in the  1960s. Now their remains are coming out of the glacier, but there is something very odd about them...

Elkins once said that all the brilliant discoveries Oliver makes in his book have been made by other physical anthropologists.  Elkins just makes them all occur to our hero, and gives them a criminal twist.  Did I make that sound easy?  If it was then everybody would be writing books like this.  And they don't.

Gideon Oliver, that most engaging forensic anthropologist, solves a lulu here....Aaron Elkins is witty, and oh so clever with that final twist."
- New York Daily News

2/20/1989 Gideon Oliver on TV

February 20, 1989.  ABC's Mystery Movie series had some great shows: Columbo and Kojak, for example.  Gideon Oliver, which premiered on this day, was none of them.

It was based, loosely, on Aaron Elkins' series of books about a physical anthropologist, i.e. the skeleton detective.  But TV's Oliver (played by a wasted Lou Gossett, Jr.) was more of a general anthropologist, dealing with cults and tongs.  The result was not good.

Here is part of what reviewer Richard Meyers said in The Armchair Detective:

"I can imagine Aaron [Elkins] visiting Hollywood, nudging his lovely wife Charlotte, and going, 'Isn't that Gideon Oliver's femur over there?  Isn't that his sternum?'
"Gideon Oliver  is dead.  Long live Gideon Oliver."

9/10/1989 Enter the Icy Clutches

September 10, 1989.  On this day the action begins in Aaron Elkins' sixth novel about anthropologist and bone expert Gideon Oliver.  Icy Clutches involves three scientific researchers who died in an avalanche in the  1960s. Now their remains are coming out of the glacier, but there is something very odd about them...

Elkins once said that all the brilliant discoveries Oliver makes in his book have been made by other physical anthropologists.  Elkins just makes them all occur to our hero,and gives them a criminal twist.  Did I make that sound easy?  If it was then everybody would be writing books like this.  And they don't.

Gideon Oliver, that most engaging forensic anthropologist, solves a lulu here....Aaron Elkins is witty, and oh so clever with that final twist."
- New York Daily News