Archives
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Rainy City by Earl Emerson
Earl W. Emerson was a firefighter in Seattle for over 32 years. He parlayed his law enforcement experience into crime fiction, winning the 1986 Shamus Award for best private eye novel for Poverty Bay (Avon Books, 1985), which was also shortlisted for the Anthony...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: A Trouble of Fools by Linda Barnes
The female private investigator, as opposed to the amateur sleuth, has been a relatively rare occurrence in crime fiction but she has popped up here and there. Loveday Brooke is an early "lady detective" created by Catherine Louisa Pirkis in 1894. Canadian writer...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Blue Murder by Harriet Rutland
Among the authors who tantalized readers with a few good mysteries and then disappeared is Olive Seers Shimwell (1901-1962) who published three mysteries under the name Harriet Rutland. She produced Knock, Murderer, Knock (Skeffington & Son, 1938); Bleeding...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin
Celia Fremlin (1914–2009) was a British graduate of Oxford, Somerville College, same as Dorothy L. Sayers. She published two sociological books about the effects of the war on everyday people before turning to psychological thrillers that focused on domestic...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Patterns in the Dust by Lesley Grant-Adamson
Lesley Grant-Adamson is a British writer of mystery fiction. She wrote for magazines and newspapers before becoming a full-time freelancer. Besides crime novels, she has written television scripts, poetry, magazine articles, and short stories. Her...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Unholy Dying by R. T. Campbell
Ruthven Campbell Todd (1914–1978) was a Scottish poet, artist, and novelist. (Ruthven is pronounced 'riven'.) During World War II he wrote about a dozen detective novels. He used a pseudonym at the advice of Cecil Day Lewis, who also had a pen name for his...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Death Syndicate by Judson P. Philips
Judson Philips, also writing as Hugh Pentecost and Philip Owen, started his literary career with short stories for pulp magazines. His first book about Inspector Luke Bradley, Cancelled in Red(Dodd Mead, 1939), won the Red Badge Prize and his novelist career began....
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Murder in Style by Emma Lou Fetta
Emma Lou Fetta (1898-1975) was a native Hoosier, born in Richmond, Indiana, where she attended Earlham College, a Quaker educational institution founded in 1847. She became a journalist, a foreign correspondent, and the press officer for The Fashion Group, a...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: What a Body! by Alan Green
In 1950 Alan Green, a partner in the Green-Brodie advertising agency, won the Edgar for best first novel. It seems to have been his only mystery. The other nominees for best debut that year were Bart Spicer, who went on to write 15 or so books in four series;...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Gideon’s Day by J. J. Marric
John Creasey MBE (1908–1973) was an English author of crime, romance, and western novels. Creasey was a human writing machine, producing more than six hundred novels using twenty-eight different pseudonyms. Mostly he’s known for his crime fiction, of which there...
