Archives
Florentine Finish by Cornelius Hirschberg
Cornelius Hirschberg (1901-1995) is another of those authors who emerge from nowhere, produce one fine mystery, and then turn their attention to other pursuits, leaving readers like me to wonder how many more good stories were left untold. Hirschberg was 63 years...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Hasty Wedding by Mignon G. Eberhart
Thanks to the miracle of Google, I discovered this brief article from TIME magazine called “Books: Mysteries of the Month: May 30, 1938”: “Of seven average and better than average mystery stories published last month, three stood out as best bets. In order of...
The Mourner by Richard Stark
Donald Westlake (1933-2008) was an assiduous and creative author with about 100 crime fiction novels and dozens of short stories to his credit under various pen names including John B. Allan, Judson Jack Carmichael, Curt Clark, Timothy J. Culver, J....
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Murder Breaks Trail by Eunice Mays Boyd
While at Left Coast Crime in San Francisco, I visited The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley, where most of the university’s special collections are housed, including a fabulous assortment of mysteries by California authors. Curator Randal...
Body Scissors by Jerome Doolittle
Body Scissors by Jerome Doolittle (Pocket Books, 1990) is the first of six political thrillers released between 1990 and 1995 featuring Tom Bethany, a former member of the Olympic wrestling team and a Vietnam vet, who describes himself as a security consultant but...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Death of Mr. Gantley by Miles Burton
Cecil John Charles Street (1884-1964) was a serving British army officer who attained the rank of Major. He was also a pillar of Golden Age crime fiction, writing under multiple names, producing four detective novels a year for thirty-seven years. As John Rhode, he...
The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman
Long before Jessica Fletcher, Sister Mary Helen, or Agatha Raisin, there was Mrs. Emily Pollifax of suburban New Jersey, widowed grandmother, hospital volunteer, garden club member, and occasional CIA agent. In 14 books published between 1966 and 2000, MWA Grand...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Corpse at the Carnival by George Bellairs
I am slowly working my way through the entire list of Littlejohn mysteries by George Bellairs. Bellairs was the pseudonym of Harold Blundell (1902-1982), a Manchester bank manager as well as a freelance journalist. He published 57 popular classic police procedurals...
The Ringer by Dell Shannon
Barbara Elizabeth Linington (1921-1988) was an astonishingly productive American author who wrote under the names Elizabeth Linington, Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, Egan O'Neill, and Dell Shannon. She initially wrote radio and stage dramas and then turned to...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Footsteps That Stopped by A. Fielding
Some two dozen mysteries were published under the name Archibald Fielding or A. Fielding or A. E. Fielding between 1924 and 1944. They are attributed to Dorothy Feilding (sic) about whom little is known, not even her year of birth apparently. The Golden Age of...
