Archives
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Death in Harley Street by John Rhode
Cecil John Charles Street (1884-1964) was an impressively productive author of Golden Age crime fiction. As John Rhode, he created a series of about 70 books with Dr. Lancelot Priestley, Inspector Hanslet, and Inspector Jimmy Waghorn, published between 1925 and...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Post after Post-Mortem by E. C. R. Lorac
The British Library is steadily re-releasing the catalog of E. C. R. Lorac, title by title. Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958) published more than 70 mysteries under the names E. C. R. Lorac and Carol Carnac. Nearly all of the Lorac titles, about 45 of them, feature...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Murder in Texas by Ada E. Lingo
Murder in Texas by Ada Emma Lingo (Houghton Mifflin, 1935; Coachwhip, 2016) is another of those books that stands alone as its creator’s known output. Ada Lingo started as a journalist writing up social events for newspapers and then earned a medical degree which...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: A Gentle Murderer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Dorothy Salisbury Davis (1916-2014) was known for her deeply human characters and the sensitivity and compassion with which she portrayed them in her suspense fiction. She was nominated for an Edgar Award six times, served as President of...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Snake-Bite and Other Mystery Tales of the Sahara by Robert S. Hichens
Stark House departed from its usual focus on mid-20th century authors when it produced this collection of North African short fiction by Robert S. Hichens (1864-1959) last year. Hichens was a prolific English author, beginning with his first novel published in...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Fatality in Fleet Street by Christopher St. John Sprigg
Christopher St John Sprigg (1907- 1937) was an English writer of poetry, plays, short stories, detective novels, and aeronautics textbooks. In his mid-20s he became fascinated by Marxism and his writing from then on reflected this new interest. When the Spanish...
Favorite Books of 2022
The running list of titles I kept during 2022 shows I attempted 146 books. I set 10 aside unfinished and completed the remaining 136 and possibly a few that didn’t get recorded. As I scanned the titles, the following are the ones that stood out. All but one were...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer
Algernon Vernon Mills (1905-1953) only wrote a few books, using the name Rupert Latimer. Murder After Christmas (MacDonald & Co., 1944; Poisoned Pen Press, 2022), a look at Christmas in England midpoint through the second World War, seems to be his last. Crime...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Christmas Tree Murders by Joel Y. Dane
Joel Y. Dane was the pseudonym of Joseph Francis Delany (1905-1957) who seems to have lived his entire life in New York. He wrote five mysteries about Sergeant Cass Harty; the fourth one is The Christmas Tree Murders (Doubleday Doran for Crime Club, 1938;...
Friday’s Forgotten Book: Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake
Nothing says Christmas like a country house party with snow and a murder or two, so to get into the spirit of the season I turned to Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake (Collins, 1936), the second title in the Nigel Strangeways series. Nicholas Blake is the...
