Macavity and Anthony award winner Susan Dunlap is perhaps best known for her first mystery series, one of the early portrayals of women as law enforcement professionals instead of amateur sleuths. Jill Smith, a homicide detective, appeared in 10 novels between 1981...
Judson Pentecost Philips (1903-1989) started his literary career writing short stories for pulp magazines. His first book about Inspector Luke Bradley, Cancelled in Red (Dodd Mead, 1939), won the $1,000 Red Badge Prize and the $10,000 prize for the Dodd Mead Mystery...
I knew Gwen Bristow (1903–1980) as an author of historical fiction. Her book about pioneers on the Santa Fe Trail called Jubilee Trail (1950) was on bestseller lists for months and was turned into a successful film of the same name. She also wrote a generational saga...
I looked at Elizabeth Ferrars’ first book about Andrew Basnett last year, which I liked enough to want to sample more of her considerable body of work. This week I read her first story about Virginia and Felix Freer, a hopelessly mismatched married couple. Virginia is...
Originally published in Mystery Readers Journal, Volume 39, Number 1 (Spring 2023). Dr. Samuel Quarshie is the amateur detective in mysteries written by John Vectis Carew Wyllie (1914-1997) in the late 1970s. The doctor was educated at McGill University in Montreal...
