Archives
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Templeton Case by Victor L. Whitechurch
Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch (1868-1933) took holy orders after university and had a long career in the church. He wrote 24 books, including an autobiography. He developed an interest in mysteries, first writing short stories featuring a railway detective named...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Death Beats the Band by Ida Shurman
Death Beats the Band (Phoenix Press Publishers, 1943; Coachwhip, 2020) seems to have been the only book that Ida Shurman (1916-1997) wrote. She was a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music and spent most of her career working in the sociology field with her...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Brading Collection by Patricia Wentworth
A recent comment on the Golden Age Detection Facebook group sent me back to Patricia Wentworth and Miss Silver this week. I picked up The Brading Collection (Hodder & Stoughton, 1950), the 18th in Miss Silver’s adventures, later published as Mr. Brading’s...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Fen Country by Edmund Crispin
Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978) who wrote crime fiction under the name Edmund Crispin and composed music under his real name is hardly a forgotten author. His literary output was small compared to some of his contemporaries, only nine novels and two volumes of...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: A Death to Remember by Roger Ormerod
Roger Ormerod (1920-2005) was an inventive and prolific author of crime fiction. After a career in multiple civil service positions, he took up writing and published nearly 50 books between 1974 and 1999. That’s almost two books a year. His series characters were...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Truth Comes Limping by J. J. Connington
J. J. Connington was a pseudonym for Alfred Walter Stewart (1880-1947), a Scot educated in Glasgow, Germany, and London. Stewart had a long career as a university lecturer and professor in Chemistry at Glasgow and Belfast. He wrote two dozen mysteries between...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Treasure by Post by David Williams
David Stuart Williams (1926-2003) was a successful advertising executive who began dabbling in crime fiction as a hobby before illness forced his retirement and he took up writing full time. He published 23 detective novels between 1976 and 2003, 6 about...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Death Sails the Nile by F. Burks McKinley
Death Sails the Nile by F. Burks McKinley (The Stratford Company, 1933; Coachwhip Publications, 2018) was the only mystery published by Mary Frances Burks (1907-1970). Burks was a Tennessee native, graduating from Vanderbilt University and marrying historian and...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: I Could Murder Her by E. C. R. Lorac
Between 1931 and 1959 Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958) published more than 70 mysteries under the names E. C. R. Lorac and Carol Carnac. Nearly all of the E. C. R. Lorac titles, about 45 of them, feature Chief Inspector Robert MacDonald, a Scot...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Death in the Willows by Richard Forrest
Richard Stockton Forrest (1932-2005) was an author of mysteries and nonfiction, as well as short stories. He also wrote under the names Stockton Woods, Lee Evans, and Rebecca Morgan. His first novel was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1975. His next...
