Harry Kemelman Biography

American crime writer, born in Boston, educated at Boston University and Harvard. He is the author of a number of detective stories set in a small town in Massachusetts. The first, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late (1964), was followed by Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry (1966), Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home (1969), and others with similar titles. In all the hero is the local rabbi, David Small, who solves mysteries by the application of pilpul, or Talmudic logic. Kemelman has written that his purpose is ‘to explain—via a fictional setting—the Jewish religion’.