Month: September 2017
Halloween Bingo 2017: Update 3, Part 2 — Catching up on Reviews
The “bingo” squares and books read: My Square Markers and “Virgin” Bingo Card: “Virgin” card posted for ease of tracking and comparison. Black Kitty: Read but not called Black Vignette: Called but not read Black Kitty in Black Vignette: Read and Called Black Kitty Center Square: Read = Called Current Status […]
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Ngaio Marsh: Five Assorted Roderick Alleyn Mysteries
A five-volume foray into Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn series: next to Agatha Christie’s, Dorothy Sayers’s, Margery Allingham’s and Patricia Wentworth’s one of the major Great Detective series of the Golden Age; taken together, these five writers are unquestionably the era’s “Queens of Crime.” (I own print versions of all of Marsh’s novels, too, and pulled […]
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Dick Francis: Knockdown
I love horses and used to be an enthusiastic horseback rider throughout my entire school years, and I also love mysteries, so Dick Francis’s books were a natural go-to choice for me once upon a time. Having revisited a Dick Francis novel after many years, though, I find that this, too, hasn’t weathered the passage […]
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Agatha Christie: Endless Night (BBC full cast dramatization)
I said not so long ago that (barring Christie’s overwhelmingly abysmal final books) Endless Night isn’t exactly my favorite book by her and that I probably wouldn’t revisit it anytime soon — then this CD crossed my path for a song during a recent book store browse, and I figured it had to be karma, […]
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Edgar Allan Poe: The Dupin Stories — The Murders in the Rue Morgue / The Mystery of Marie Rogêt / The Purloined Letter
I already knew these stories and chiefly bought this CD for Kerry Shale’s narration: Ever since I first listenend to his audio versions of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance cycle, I’ve been on the lookout for further recordings featuring him. Edgar Allan Poe is credited with having created the first professional detective in C. Auguste Dupin — […]
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Various Authors: Murder Most Foul
This is a collection of eight short stories by different authors, read with great aplomb by five well-known British actors. It starts of with Bluebeard’s Bath by Margery Allingham — read by Patrick Malahide –, a “non-Campion” twist on the black widow trope (the twist being, as the title implies, that here it’s a black […]
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Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Terrifying women all around with this one — Shirley Jackson delivers every single time when it comes to sheer psychology-based horror; and so, for that matter, do her characters. You’re barely ten minutes into the story, and you’re already supremely uneasy — and boy, does this ever have a slow, peeling-away-layer-by-layer burn ending in a […]
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The Medieval Murderers: House of Shadows
The Medieval Murderers round robin series is, literally, one of those products of an idle evening at the pub — I guess that’s what you’ll get when you have five authors of medieval whodunits talking shop over a pint or two (or three …) of ale. Permanent members of the group, which itself goes by […]
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Simon Brett: An Amateur Corpse
An actor and BBC broadcast journalist in addition to being a writer, Simon Brett is one of Martin Edwards’s predecessors as President of the Detection Club. In the early 1970s he began writing a series of mysteries centering on an actor named Charles Paris; this is the fourth of these books. Paris is invited […]
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Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
It’s with no small amount of surprise that I find myself registering a 4 1/2 star rating and a “favorite” check for this audio recording of Emily Brontë’s one and only novel. Though I didn’t have any doubts that the mother and son team of Prunella Scales and Samuel West would pull off a stellar […]
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Martin Edwards: The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books
The standout read among the books I read in the third week of September; a tour de force parcours through 50 years of British crime writing (from 1900 to 1950), with sidelights on authors and books published in the U.S., continental Europe, Argentina and Japan. Martin Edwards is concurrently President of the Crime Writers’ Association […]
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Halloween Bingo 2017: Update 3 — BINGO!
Diagonal, top left corner to bottom right corner. The “bingo” squares and books read: Plus a bingo-“ready” completed column (second from right) … and two more bingos in the making once I’ve read my books for “Diverse Voices” (=> all 4 corners plus center square) and “werewolves” (=> center row) — and once […]
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Martin Edwards: The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books — Part 4: Chapters 16-24
Reading progress update: 357 of 357 pages. Finished; full review to come as part of my next bingo update. Right now, my head is still too much in a whirl, brimming with the names and information that Edwards has crammed into it. The book’s final chapters explore specific topics and methods of narration pioneered by […]
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Martin Edwards: The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books — Part 3: Chapters 11-15
Reading progress update: 219 of 357 pages. From the chapters covering some of the key locations of classic British mysteries (the countryside, including and especially country manors, as well as London — of course — and domestic and international vacation resorts), we’ve now moved to an exploration of how the various writers used their “original” […]
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Martin Edwards: The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books — Part 2: Chapters 6-10
Reading progress update: 158 of 357 pages. Up to the end of chapter 10 now, and we’ve moved into the territory also covered by Edward’s short story anthologies: Serpents in Eden (countryside crimes), Murder at the Manor (country house crimes), Capital Crimes (London mysteries) and Resorting to Murder (detectives solving crimes while on vacation), and […]
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Martin Edwards: The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books — Part 1: Chapters 1-5
Reading progress update: 98 of 357 pages. Well, I’ve read chapters 1 through 5, and I suppose this is what it sounds like when you get a walking encyclopedia talking. Even though it’s, in a way, the print equivalent of having your favorite actor reading the phone book, however (which I expected going in — […]
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Abbey Weekend
I spent yesterday and this morning near Maria Laach abbey, a gorgeously-maintained, fairly important (Romanic) Benedictine abbey (founded in 1093) on the shores of a volcanic lake a little less than an hour south of Bonn, celebrating my mom’s birthday and reading my “haunted houses” bingo book — which just happens to be set […]
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Ruth Rendell: The Babes in the Wood & Not in the Flesh
For the “In the Dark, Dark Woods” square, I decided on a Ruth Rendell double dip. The Babes in the Wood and Not […]
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Donna Andrews: Lord of the Wings
A Halloween entry in Donna Andrews’s long-running series featuring Caerphilly, VA artisan blacksmith and volunteer town events organizer Meg Langslow — what could possibly be more fitting for this bingo square? Caerphilly (that’s CaerPHILLY to you reporters if you don’t want to have the locals screaming at their TVs at the top of their voices) […]
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Raymond Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely / The High Window / The Long Goodbye
Farewell, My Lovely Farewell, My Lovely is supposed to have been Raymond Chandler’s own favorite novel, and although it didn’t quite manage to elbow The Big Sleep out of the top spot of my personal affections for Chandler’s writing, it came darned close, and It Is also, along with the Christopher Lee / Robert Louis Stevenson […]
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