Archives
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Away Went the Little Fish by Margot Bennett
Margot Bennett (1912-1980) worked as an advertising copywriter, as a nurse and translator during the Spanish Civil War, and as a television scriptwriter. She wrote literary fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. Compared to her Golden Age contemporaries, her...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Not All Tarts Are Apple by Pip Granger
A wonderful book told from the perspective of a child, Not All Tarts Are Apple by Pip Granger (Poisoned Pen Press, 2002) is set in London in 1953, which was awash with excitement over the approaching coronation of Queen Elizabeth. No one was more thrilled than...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Murder on the Bus by Cecil Freeman Gregg
Cecil Freeman Gregg (1898-1960) was a chartered secretary and accountant born in London. He published 42 mysteries between 1928 and 1960, with two main series characters, Inspector Cuthbert Higgins and Harry Prince. Harry Prince was a thief who was driven to a life...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Knife Slipped by Erle Stanley Gardner
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) was an attorney who wanted to earn enough money writing pulp fiction so that he could quit the practice of law. The general public knows him best as the creator of Perry Mason courtroom dramas but under the name of A. A. Fair he...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: To Kill a Cat by W. J. Burley
The works of W. J. Burley have been on my TBR list for years. I was given the opportunity to acquire a few of them recently and was able to rectify my oversight. William John Burley (1914-2002) began writing after completing a mid-career degree at Oxford and taking...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Crooked Lane by Frances Noyes Hart
Frances Newbold Noyes Hart (1890-1943) mostly wrote short stories for Scribner's magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Ladies' Home Journal, although sometimes she branched out into longer fiction. The Bellamy Trial (1927) was so popular that Howard...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Last Best Hope by Ed McBain
The Last Best Hope by Ed McBain (Warner Books, 1998) is the concluding book in the Matthew Hope series of 13 titles. One of the noteworthy aspects of this story is that the author clearly ends the narrative arc of Hope’s adventures with it. That option isn’t...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton
Cecil John Charles Street (1884-1964) was a pillar of Golden Age crime fiction, writing under multiple names. As John Rhode, he created a series of about 70 books with Dr. Lancelot Priestley, Inspector Hanslet, and Inspector Jimmy Waghorn, published between 1925...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Death at the Medical Board by Josephine Bell
Josephine Bell was the pseudonym of Doris Bell Collier Ball (1897-1987), a British author who also studied and practiced medicine. Bell began to write detective novels beginning in 1936 under her pen name. Many of her works made good use of her medical...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: A Deceptive Clarity by Aaron Elkins
Aaron Elkins is an Edgar award winning author, mostly known for his books about Gideon Oliver, a forensic anthropology expert in Washington State. Another early series which I rarely hear mentioned is about an art historian and only has three books. The first is A...