Recent Posts
The Handle by Richard Stark
I found The Handle (Pocket Books, 1966) by Richard Stark, i.e., Donald Westlake, on my Kindle a couple of weeks ago. I did not remember reading it, or perhaps my reading was too long ago to recall, but I promptly moved it up on my metaphoric stack. The Handle is...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Bland Beginning by Julian Symons
Cruising through eBay last fall, always a dangerous pastime, I found a group of books in the short-lived Unicorn Mystery Book Club. The subscription service published four crime fiction novels in a single volume, beginning in 1945 and ending in late 1952. The 83...
The Scavengers by Bill Knox
William Knox (1928–1999) was a Scottish author, journalist and broadcaster, known for his more than 50 crime novels and for presenting the long-running STV series Crimedesk. In the 1970s, he presented a 15-minute segment asking...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Mouse Who Wouldn’t Play Ball by Anthony Gilbert
The 12th case of Arthur G. Crook is the intriguingly named The Mouse Who Wouldn’t Play Ball (Collins, 1943), a wartime story with some classic characters. The mouse in question is Miss Dorothea Capper, an unmarried lady of 38 who seems much older, living on a...
Friday the Rabbi Slept Late by Harry Kemelman
Harry Kemelman (1908-1996) was a schoolteacher before World War II, worked in multiple government positions during the war and launched a freelance writing career afterwards. He began publishing in 1947 with the first of his short stories about New England college...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Murder of a Nymph by Margot Neville
The works of Australian sisters Margot Goyder (1896–1975) and Anne Neville Goyder Joske (1887–1966) have been on my reading list for awhile. Writing under the name Margot Neville, the pair wrote short stories, plays, and humorous novels before creating Detective...
Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who still reads at every opportunity and loves to talk about what she is reading.