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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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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 -
Blog postFriday the Rabbi Slept Late is a traditional mystery with an untraditional detective. The protagonist, Rabbi David Small, is a young, somewhat unkempt, scholar and rabbi, who is new to his congregation in Barnard’s Crossing, a coastal town in Massachusetts. (The author, Harry Kemelman, lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts, for over 50 years, and it’s clear that Barnard’s Crossing is based on Marblehead.) Small’s training as a rabbi has focused on the logical analysis of the Talmud, the ce
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Blog postI’m still making my way through unread books of Ngaio Marsh; Photo Finish, a book late in the Roderick Alleyn series, is not one of her best, I’m sad to say. As in many of her books, there is a theatrical background, though this time it’s a performance of a new opera that is the centerpiece of the plot. There is also a New Zealand setting, but aside from one Maori character, the book could have just as well been set in any country. Essentially, it’s a manor house mystery, with a group of peop
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I received this book as a Christmas gift and I’ve been having a wonderful time with it!
My first instinct — and this may be yours as well, since you are a reader of this blog — was to go through the Table of Contents, pencil in hand, and check off all the books I’d already read. Results: 30 out of 100. Hmmm, not too bad, but so many more books to enjoy. Next I turned to the chapter on Trent’s Last Case, my personal favorite of the early classics (see my rev
Books By Carole B. Shmurak
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Death by Committee (Susan Lombardi Mysteries)
May 22, 2011
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Deadmistress (Susan Lombardi Mysteries Book 1)
Feb 25, 2011
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