“I Never Wanted to Repeat Myself”

We’d previously missed this news. But Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis today draws our attention to a London Times obituary of Philip Freund, an American anthropologist and author who, while certainly best known for penning “a comprehensive, multivolume history of world theatre,” also wrote at least three books that qualify as crime/mystery fiction. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he was 99 years old.

“A consummate generalist, and one incapable of remaining idle,” the Times observes, “he was not averse to the odd bread-and-butter writing gig in addition to his scholarly and literary efforts.” That “bread-and-butter writing” apparently included The Beholder: Seven Tales for Sebastian Romm (1961), The Devious Ways (1962), and The Spymaster (1965).

Freund died on December 20, 2007, “fully productive up to the last few weeks of [his] life.”