Let's face it. The thing does have an element of--well, of what some people would call the ridiculous. But does that make the problem any ...| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
1952-53 was a tough time for John Dickson Carr, who in his mid-forties suffered from physical illness and overall disenchantment with life. But still the man persevered. At the end of 1952 he was working on finishing the Sir Henry Merrivale detective novel The Cavalier's Cup (1953) and had started the historical mystery thriller Captain Cut-Throat (1955); he was also trying to write Sherlock Holmes radio scripts for the BBC (based on the original tales) and to complete his series of Sherl...| The Passing Tramp
"...he's being deliberately mysterious." "Well, so are you." "It's sex, Leo....Sex! The unbreakable taboo!" "...he wants no traffic with swe...| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
The Passing Tramp: Wandering through the mystery genre, book by book.| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
Frank Gruber was a successful and above all else extremely prolific pulps writer of the Thirties who like Cornell Woolrich and other pulps ...| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
Ruth Rendell published 14 Barbara Vine novels over nearly three decades between 1986 and 2014. As perhaps can be expected with a highly prolific writer--in addition to the 14 Vines she published 52 novels under her own name, as well as seemingly countless pieces of short fiction--the Vines afforded diminishing yields of poisoned fruit over time. Rendell banged out the first three Vine novels--A Dark Adapted Eye, A Fatal Inversionand The House of Stairs--in just three years between 1986 a...| The Passing Tramp
In 1966 at age 35 the late Catherine Aird published her debut detective novel, The Religious Body, putting her squarely in the midst of what might be called second wave crime queening in British detective fiction. With Dead Men Don't Ski in 1959, Patricia Moyes slightly anticipated this newer generation of Sixties women mystery authors who were writing firmly in the style of their predecessors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey and Gladys ...| The Passing Tramp
"Just how big is Pottsville, anyways?" "Well, sir," I said, "there's a road sign just outside of town that says 'Pop. 1280,' so I guess that's about it. Twelve hundred and eighty souls."| The Passing Tramp
Thus, for the tenth time that day, he had worked the twenties, one of the three standard gimmicks of the short con grift. The other two are the smack and the tat, usually good for bigger scores but not nearly so swift nor safe. Some marks fall for the twenties repeatedly, without ever tipping. | The Passing Tramp
As crime and mystery writers got increasingly interested during the mid-century in the psychology of murderers, fictional slayers became portrayed in increasingly nuanced ways, not just as ingenious chess puzzle plotting murder fiends and slavering shocker maniacs. Fredric Brown's The Lenient Beast (1956) looks at the seemingly paradoxical concept of the kindly killer and is reminiscent of novels like Helen Nielsen's The Kind Man and Dorothy Salisbury Davis' A Gentle Murderer, both of whi...| The Passing Tramp
I haven't posted in almost a month but have been working on a Fredric Brown article and I did a couple of book intros in that time too. The Fred Brown article is about 12,500 words and forty pages with lots of new information on the author and will appear shortly. I hope you will read and enjoy it. For now I'm posting some shorter reviews of Brown works.| The Passing Tramp
Michigan writer and intellectual Russell Kirke (1918-1994) has been called the Forgotten Father of American Conservatism and the greatest twentieth-century conservative man of letters, but, outside of strictly politics, he was also a proponent and practitioner of the classic ghost story most prominently associated with the English academic medievalist scholar M. R. James (1862-1936). | The Passing Tramp
I looked into the biographical information on Fredric Brown over the weekend and found a lot of it is wrong. So I thought I would go over some of the issues here. It strikes me that "Brownie," to use his high school nickname (though in spite of his surname he was blond), was one of the most important mid-century noirists or hard-boiled writers. Much of his work is back in print again, but he still seems not to get quite the credit that he should in my view (and the view of those in his ...| The Passing Tramp
"It isn't a nice story. It's got murder in it, and women and liquor and gambling and even prevarication."| The Passing Tramp
Genteel English 'manners" mystery fiction arguably achieved its apogee in the late mid-to-late 1930s and the 1940s with such crime writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, Patricia Wentworth, Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake, to name some of the subgenre's most prominent exponents. Even writers not directly association with manners mystery, like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, published manners-ish mysteries like Five Little Pigs and The Hollow (...| The Passing Tramp
"From what I've seen, I shouldn't think there's a house or cottage in Thornden where they aren't chewing over the crime at this very moment."| The Passing Tramp
After four installments with thrillerish elements, the Miss Silver series really came into its own as a true detective series in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl. Just as the author would give English mystery fans some paradigmatic village mysteries in the 1940s and 1950s, in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl she gave her readers a classic country house party mystery, just as the mystery subgenre's heyday was passing during the Second World War. England would never be the same after the war and ne...| The Passing Tramp
Catherine Aird , who died ten days ago at the age of 94 from a massive stroke, was one of the notable figures of the British Silver Age of D...| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
" [W]e shall hear the Red Flag sung in Westminster Abbey within the next twelve months. " -- Miss Brown of X. Y. O. (1927), by E. Phillips ...| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
Peter Lovesey in the 1970s, when he began publishing crime fiction This is a hard piece for me to write, not because I think Peter Lovesey ...| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
" But this light-heartedness was not to last. " --Death Comes to Pemberley In the final chapter of Pride and Prejudice (1813) author Ja...| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
"What's this bird, this falcon, that everybody's all steamed up about?" "You're a fine lot of lollipops!" -- PI Sam Spade in The Maltese Fa...| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
Readers of this blog will recall my posting last year about how I was fired by Otto Penzler (OP) from writing intros for Mysterious Press' c...| thepassingtramp.blogspot.com
As I commented on a previous post, Ruth Rendell when she was publicizing one of her final novels, The Child's Child (2012), divulged that she had had a gay cousin who died in 1989 from AIDS complications, to whom she had been very close. He was put through aversion therapy in the 1970s, she told an interviewer, "and it was so horrible he ran away....Of course I knew he was gay. We were great friends as well as cousins."| The Passing Tramp
By the time the 21st century rolled around, Ruth Rendell, who turned seventy as its dawn, had published forty-six novels and six short story collections over thirty-six years. That is a lot of writing, but the seemingly indefatigable author kept on going, producing another score of crime novels and another short story collection in the fourteen years left to her. There were nine non-series Rendells (the last published posthumously in 2015), six Wexfords and five Barbara Vines. There was...| The Passing Tramp
One intriguing aspect of these birds [ravens] is the collective noun used to describe a group of them: unkindness....there are several other collective nouns used to describe groups of ravens including conspiracy and treachery.| The Passing Tramp