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![[(Death at Hilliard High)] [By (author) Carole B Shmurak] published on (February, 2011) Paperback](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/419Dw0jSO3L.SR160,240_BG243,243,243.jpg)
Author Updates
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Blog postContinuing my journey through the works of Ngaio Marsh, I’ve just completed Scales of Justice (1955). On the back cover, there was a quote from the legendary Anthony Boucher (of Bouchercon fame) that read “Her best pure formal detective story.” Indeed, the detection by Marsh’s sleuth, Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard, may be admirable, but I couldn’t connect in any signifciant way to any of the characters. (Maybe that’s the “pure formal” part?)
Usually, Marsh introduces the characters -
Blog postAgatha Christie, whose second husband was the British archeologist Max Mallowan, once said, “An archeologist is the best husband any woman can get. Just consider: The older she gets, the more he is interested in her.”
Christie met Mallowan in Iraq in 1928, and married him in 1930. She often accompanied him on his digs, helping with the photography at excavations in Iraq and Syria. After World War 2, she helped with his excavation of Assyrian ruins in Iraq. So when I was searching for -
Blog postI’ve mentioned before that I compose a “Top Ten” list of mysteries each year to post on Dorothy-L. When I look over the last twenty years of these lists, one name stands out: Peter Lovesey. I read my first Lovesey book – The Last Detective – in 2003 and was hooked. (The book won the 1992 Anthony Award for Best Mystery, so I don’t know what took me so long to discover it.) It was his first mystery featuring detective Peter Diamond, and I soon caught up with that series. Since then I find
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Blog postNgaio Marsh spent much of her life on ships, travelling from New Zealand to England and back, so she knew a lot about long sea voyages. (Maybe she’s even showing off a little in this book when she talks about things like the “forrard well-deck” and “hatch combing?”)
Ten years after Singing in the Shrouds was published, Marsh sent Roderick Alleyn’s artist wife, Troy, on a river cruise with a murderer aboard (see my review of Clutch of Constables). But in 1958, it was Alleyn himself who boa -
Blog postSad to say: The Old Success was a failure as far as I’m concerned.
After her previous book, The Knowledge (2018), made my Top Ten list for 2019, I was eager to read the next installment. (See my review of The Knowledge here.) But The Old Success (2019) was awful – I think she phoned it in. Characters from books written 10-30 years ago were mentioned without explanation; other ongoing characters, like Vivian Rivington and Diane DeMornay, were brought in for no apparent reason exc -
Blog postParnell Hall (1944 – 2020) died this past week, and I’m so saddened by this. Parnell was an old friend from DorothyL and from so many mystery conferences like Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. He was also an occasional penpal, sending me hilarious answers to my (I thought) innocent questions.
But most of all, he was a fine mystery writer. Because his books were so funny, some people overlooked how cleverly plotted they were. I’m referring here to his 20 Stanley Hastings books, all of wh -
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Blog postNgaio Marsh (1895-1982) began writing Golden Age mysteries in 1934 and continued writing them right up to her death. Some of the later ones are excellent (see my reviews of Clutch of Constables and Light Thickens) and some are disappointing (Photo Finish). I think this one belongs in the latter category.
In this book, Superintendent Roderick Alleyn is – no surprise here – in Rome. He’s on the case of some international drug dealers and, in that role, he has been given an introduction -
Blog postBarbaraNeely (her legal name had no spaces) died in March, 2020. She had recently (December 2019) been named a “Grandmaster” by the Mystery Writers of America, an honor usually given to those who have written a long list of mystery novels, going back over many years. But Neely had written only four – all about Blanche White, a domestic worker. And yet that was enough for the Washington Post to refer to her as “a genre unto herself.”
Her Grandmaster award came with this tribute: “Neely -
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Blog postChester Himes was an angry man – and his mysteries are full of rage. Expelled from Ohio State University as a sophomore in 1928 for a fraternity prank that ended in a bar brawl, and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor (of which he served seven years) for armed robbery, Himes began to write short stories based on his prison experiences. The stories were published in African-American newspapers and in Esquire magazine, where they were signed with his name and prison ID number. In the 1940s, Him
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Blog postI’ve been reading Martha Grimes’s Richard Jury books since the 1980s. I remember, early on, loving her precocious child characters, like ten-year-old Lady Jessica of Help the Poor Struggler (1985). Since I started keeping “Top Ten” lists in 1999 in order to post them on the DorothyL mystery e-list, Grimes’s books have appeared several times: The Blue Last (2001), Winds of Change (2004), The Black Cat (2010). I’m fairly certain that The Knowledge (2018) will make my Top Ten for the coming year
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