Archives
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Go Down, Death by Sue Brown Hays
Sue Brown Hays (1905-?) was the descendant of several generations of Mississippi and Louisiana cotton planters. Go Down, Death, which appears to be her only book, was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1946 and by Hammond, Hammond & Company in 1948....
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Casual Slaughters by James Quince
James Quince was the pseudonym used by James Reginald Spittal (1876-1951), an English clergyman who wrote three novels in the 1930s and then went on to other pursuits. As has been noted, it is a loss for crime fiction readers that he didn’t continue writing. Based...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Error of the Moon by Sara Woods
Sara Woods took her barrister protagonist Antony Maitland out of the courtroom for his fourth adventure, Error of the Moon (Collins Crime Club, 1963; Dean Street Press, 2024). Considering the state of geopolitics in the early 1960s, when the Cuban Missile Crisis...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Farmhouse by Helen Reilly
Helen Reilly (1891-1962) was an American novelist. She was born Helen Kieran and grew up in New York City in a literary family. Her brother, James Kieran, also wrote a mystery, and two of her daughters, Ursula Curtiss and Mary McMullen, were mystery...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Root of Evil by Eaton K. Goldthwaite
Eaton Kenneth Goldthwaite was an American author (1907-1994) whose series character was police Lieutenant Joseph Dickerson. His papers are held at Boston University, https://archivesspace.bu.edu/repositories/9/resources/1269. The description of the repository on...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Thirsty Evil by Gerald Verner
Gerald Verner was one of the many pen names used by John Robert Stuart Pringle (1897-1980). Other pseudonyms were Thane Leslie, Derwent Steele, Donald Stuart, and Nigel Vane. Donald Stuart was the name he used initially, writing 44 stories for the Sexton Blake...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Creeping Venom by Sheila Pim
Sheila Pim (1909–1995) was an Irish novelist and horticulturalist. She wrote four witty crime novels and three serious novels along with a biography of Irish botanist Augustine Henry. She also was an enthusiastic cultivator of flowers and vegetables and wrote...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Murder in High Place by R. B. Dominic
Mary Jane Latsis (1917-1997) and Martha Henissart (1929-?) met at Harvard, where Latsis was taking graduate classes in economics and Henissart was attending law school. While they pursued careers in their respective fields in the early 1960s, their shared...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Miss Pinnegar Disappears by Anthony Gilbert
Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899-1973) was a British author most well known for her creation of Arthur G. Crook, an entertaining beer-drinking lawyer whose ethics do not always align with those of other attorneys. Crook had some 50 adventures published under the...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Now I Lay Me Down to Die by Elizabeth Tebbetts-Taylor
Elizabeth Tebbetts-Taylor (1917-2001) was a U.S. author from the West Coast. Born in Oregon, she spent most of her life in southern California. She wrote film scripts, short stories, and novels. Her most well-known novel was Tarifa, published by Dell in 1978. She...
