Anthony Berkeley
Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap
Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot. (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.) So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]
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Anthony Berkeley: Murder in the Basement
This is middling Berkeley, not as problematic as The Wychford Poisoning Case or The Silk Stockings Murders, but OTOH also a fair way from the (mostly) enjoyable and intelligent writing that are The Poisoned Chocolates Case and Trial and Error. I rather like the setup — a body found by accident in a place where […]
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Anthony Berkeley: The Wintringham Mystery
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 23 — Personal Traditions: Read a book that involves big changes for the main character. This is relatively early book by Berkeley based on a premise that, if I hadn’t found it in a novel actually published in the interwar era, I’d have declared flat-out […]
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Members of the Detection Club: Ask a Policeman
Reading Progress Update: 8% “The murder — if it was murder — of a man like Lord Comstock was an event of world-wide importance. The newspapers controlled by the millionaire journalist exerted an influence out of all proportion to their real value. Inspired by Comstock himself, they claimed at frequent intervals to be the real […]
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Golden Age Mysteries: Further Reading
With my Detection Club Bingo card now blacked out, I’m going to track my reading here. (Note: for purposes of completeness, this includes books by the below authors already read prior to the creation of this list.) My priorities are going to be: Arthur Conan Doyle’s / Sherlock Holmes’s adventures, biographies, contemporaries and rivals, as […]
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Detection Club Bingo: My Progress So Far
Whee — only two squres to go for blackout! The Squares / Chapters: 1. A New Era Dawns: Ernest Bramah – The Tales of Max Carrados; Emmuska Orczy – The Old Man in the Corner 2. The Birth of the Golden Age: A.A. Milne – The Red House Mystery 3. The Great Detectives: Margery […]
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Members of the Detection Club: The Floating Admiral
Upon revisiting, much more fun than the first time around. Well, this was a reread for me and I said I was going to “tag along” with MR’s, BT’s and Lillelara’s buddy read — turns out I ended up whizzing through it because I liked it so much better this time around than when I […]
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The April Buddy Reads
Reblogged from: Moonlight Reader All right, everyone, open thread for April buddy reads/readalongs/etc. What I know so far: April 1: Discworld is reading the 4th Discworld book, Mort, which is also the first in the “Death” subseries. The buddy read starts on April 1, and continues through the end of April, so you can jump […]
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Six Characters Who Made a Career Change
24 Festive Tasks: Door 7 – Mawlid, Task 4: Muhammad was a merchant before becoming a religious leader. List 5 books on your shelves in which a key character makes / undergoes a radical career change. 1. Brother Cadfael: A career change can hardly get any more radical than going from crusading soldier to […]
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This happened today.
// TA decides to pack light because, after all, she’s only leaving for a 2-day business trip. Then agonizes a half hour over which one of several 100 books on physical TBR to take on the trip. // // Leaving home, finds book in mailbox that was delivered yesterday but which for reasons unknown she […]
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Anthony Berkeley: Trial and Error – Reading Progress Update: 69 of 256 Pages
Hmm. The opening pages read unexpectedly timely. Right now we seem to be sliding into typical Anthony Berkeley mode, which isn’t necessarily a good sign. But the premise and the introduction still hold the promise of more good things to come. Reading this for the “Justice Game” square of the (inofficial) Detection Club Bingo. […]
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Anthony Berkeley: The Wychford Poisoning Case
The fifth time, this year alone, that I’ve found myself running into a fictional incarnation of the (in)famous real life case of Florence Maybrick, the American-born Liverpool housewife convicted, in 1889, of having murdered her husband by administering to him a dose of arsenic obtained by soaking flypaper in water — allegedly in aid of […]
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2018 Halloween Bingo: The Books So Far
… in the order in which they’re appearing on my card (not the order in which they’ve read them). Soooo … in this year’s twist on RL doing its best trying to throw a spanner in the works of Halloween Bingo fun, I’ve been spending the better part of the month either sitting around in […]
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Anthony Berkeley: The Poisoned Chocolates Case
Anatomy of a Murder … Courtesy of the Detection Club Anthony Berkeley (full name: Anthony Berkeley Cox) was one of the co-founders of the legendary Detection Club; he published mysteries both under his own name (minus “Cox”) and the pseudonym Francis Iles, which when he first used it was kept a secret so successfully that […]
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Martin Edwards: The Golden Age of Murder
The early history of the Detection Club, told by its current president and first archivist. Martin’s knowledge of both Golden Age detective fiction and the lives of its writers is downright encyclopedic, and he tells a multi-faceted story very compellingly. At times I had the feeling that he was taking his own conjecture a bit […]
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