Jules Verne in Eighty Days" (1873). Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted. Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd The Act of Roger Murgatroyd The Act of Roger Murgatroyd: An Entertainment is a whodunit mystery novel by Scottish novelist Gilbert Adair first published in 2006. Set in the 1930s and written in the vein of an Agatha Christie novel, it has all the classic ingredients of a 1930s mystery and is, according to the author, "at one and the same time, a celebration, a parody and a critique not only of Agatha Christie but of the whole Golden Age of English whodunits", but also "a whodunit in its own right, so that those readers who were completely uninterested in