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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 -
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 -
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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Blog postAs promised, here are my final thoughts about Jo Nesbo’s Nemesis: Like most of the members of my book group, I found the storyline of this book too complicated to be truly satisfying. It certainly was an intriguing mystery with many plot twists; several times it became obvious that events I thought I understood were instead something else entirely, and just when things seemed to be sorted out, everything suddenly changed. Very, very clever – but maybe too much so?
A series of bank rob -
Blog postWay back in the late 1960’s-early 1970’s, I was an ardent fan of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and their ten Martin Beck mysteries – the first Scandinavian mystery authors to be popular in the United States. Their book The Laughing Policeman (1970), set in Stockholm, was made into an American film by the same name (1973), but moved to San Francisco. In it, Walter Matthau nicely captured both the dourness and the humor of Beck, though he was renamed ‘Jake Martin.’ Sadly, having just completed the
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Blog postIn 2000, Anthony Award voters selected the best mysteries of the 20th Century; the 5 finalists were The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Rebecca, and Gaudy Night, with Rebecca taking the top prize. I have to wonder how Gaudy Night made that list. Not that it’s not a good mystery, but it’s a difficult read compared to the others. Filled with long speeches, hundreds of quotations, and untranslated Latin phrases (plus one in untranslated Greek!), Gaudy Night is certain
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Blog postMost people hearing the title, The Thin Man, think of a classic film with William Powell and Myrna Loy. Perhaps they know that there were a series of films starring Powell and Loy with “Thin Man” in the title. Many fewer recognize it as the title of a book by the author of The Maltese Falcon. The Thin Man was the last novel that Dashiell Hammett wrote; after 1934, the only published works by Hammett were previously written short stories. Sadly, it’s not one of his better books.
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Blog postThe Father Dowling mysteries by Ralph McInerny must have been quite popular because McInerny’s publisher (St. Martin’s from the ’80s on) kept them in print for so many years. Yet the only major mystery award that McInerny seems to have won is a Bouchercon Life Achievement award in 1993; no single title was even nominated for an Agatha or an Anthony.
I’ve now read three of them: the first, Her Death of Cold (1977), and two later ones, Prodigal Father (2002) and Ash Wednesday (2008). I
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