Archives
Friday’s Forgotten Book: A Gentle Murderer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Dorothy Salisbury Davis (1916-2014) was known for her deeply human characters and the sensitivity and compassion with which she portrayed them in her suspense fiction. She was nominated for an Edgar Award six times, served as President of...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Snake-Bite and Other Mystery Tales of the Sahara by Robert S. Hichens
Stark House departed from its usual focus on mid-20th century authors when it produced this collection of North African short fiction by Robert S. Hichens (1864-1959) last year. Hichens was a prolific English author, beginning with his first novel published in...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Fatality in Fleet Street by Christopher St. John Sprigg
Christopher St John Sprigg (1907- 1937) was an English writer of poetry, plays, short stories, detective novels, and aeronautics textbooks. In his mid-20s he became fascinated by Marxism and his writing from then on reflected this new interest. When the Spanish...
Favorite Books of 2022
The running list of titles I kept during 2022 shows I attempted 146 books. I set 10 aside unfinished and completed the remaining 136 and possibly a few that didn’t get recorded. As I scanned the titles, the following are the ones that stood out. All but one were...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer
Algernon Vernon Mills (1905-1953) only wrote a few books, using the name Rupert Latimer. Murder After Christmas (MacDonald & Co., 1944; Poisoned Pen Press, 2022), a look at Christmas in England midpoint through the second World War, seems to be his last. Crime...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Christmas Tree Murders by Joel Y. Dane
Joel Y. Dane was the pseudonym of Joseph Francis Delany (1905-1957) who seems to have lived his entire life in New York. He wrote five mysteries about Sergeant Cass Harty; the fourth one is The Christmas Tree Murders (Doubleday Doran for Crime Club, 1938;...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake
Nothing says Christmas like a country house party with snow and a murder or two, so to get into the spirit of the season I turned to Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake (Collins, 1936), the second title in the Nigel Strangeways series. Nicholas Blake is the...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Suicide Murders by Howard Engel
Howard Engel (1931-2019) wrote 14 books about Benny Cooperman, an unconventional private investigator in Grantham, Ontario, Canada. Nine of them were published between 1980 and 1996 during the late 20th century flood of PI novels. Three more were published in the...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Last Escape by E. C. R. Lorac
By now anyone who is paying attention to the explosive revival of vintage detective fiction is familiar with the name E. C. R. Lorac, the pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958). Rivett published more than 70 mysteries under the names E. C. R. Lorac...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Something Wicked by E. X. Ferrars
Morna Doris MacTaggart Brown (1907-1995) wrote several novels under that name before adopting the pseudonym Elizabeth Ferrars, which became E. X. Ferrars in the United States. Her first mystery was published in 1940, the initial outing of Toby Dyke, a journalist in...
