Recent Posts
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...
Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who still reads at every opportunity and loves to talk about what she is reading.