Archives
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Nobody’s Perfect by Douglas Clark
The name of Douglas Clark (1919-1993) cropped up in an online classic mystery discussion group recently as an example of a more contemporary author who wrote traditional detective stories in line with Golden Age mystery parameters. I looked him up and learned that...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla by Stuart Palmer
Charles Stuart Palmer (1905-1968) wrote 14 books and multiple short stories about retired schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers and Inspector Oscar Piper of the New York Police Department, starting in 1931. Withers turned out to be quite popular with the public and...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Murder in Blue by Clifford Witting
Clifford Witting (1907-1968) was an English crime fiction writer. He worked as a clerk in Lloyds Bank from 1924 to 1942 and served in the Royal Artillery and the Ordinance Corps during World War II. His experiences then informed some of the 16 mysteries that...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Forget My Fate by Ruth Sawtell Wallis
Ruth Otis Sawtell Wallis (1895-1978) was a physical anthropologist with advanced degrees who contributed significantly to her field, publishing multiple books and articles. During the war and just after, from 1943 to 1950, she also produced five detective novels....
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...
