After launching her Dell Shannon and Lesley Egan series in 1960 and 1961 respectively (and penning a one-shot Gothic as Anne Blaisdell), Elizabeth Linington finally started a series under her actual birth name in 1964.  (Her full name was Barbara Elizabeth Linington.)  The primary characters in this series were LA police sergeant Ivor Maddox and policewoman Susan Carstairs.  The latter emerged as a significant character in the second book in the series, No Evil Angel (1964), the novel I discuss below.   Ivor Maddox is a slightly undersized, nondescript fellow of, no fo ..read more

First off, as of today I have had over 3 million views on the blog, a milestone I wanted to mention.  The blog started slowly in late 2012, shortly after Thanksgiving, and it took a good while to reach a million views, but now those additional millions pile up faster than one might think.  I don't blog nearly as much as I would like to anymore, and have had thoughts of doing a podcast or such, but will will see how things play out in this new year, already almost a third over.   I have written a long article on crime novelist Elizabeth Linington--and I mean long: about 28,0 ..read more

Seventy-two-year-old Sidney Toler was less than seven months away from death when shooting on The Trap--his last Charlie Chan film for poverty row Hollywood film studio Monogram--wrapped up in August 1946.  The film would premier on November 30, by which time the actor was bedridden with terminal cancer.  He died on February 12, 1947, about ten weeks shy of his seventy-third birthday. The Trap was the fifth Chan film Toler made for Monogram in 1946, following The Red Dragon, Dark Alibi, Shadows over Chinatown and Dangerous Money.  Rather like actor Bruce Willis in more recent ti ..read more

The police investigative crime novel, or police procedural, achieved a considerable vogue in the Fifties and Sixties, with the works of such authors as Maurice Procter, Hillary Waugh, J. J. Marric (John Creasey), Ed McBain and Elizabeth Linington receiving great acclaim from crime fiction critics and drawing a devoted following among mystery readers.  Crime writer and critic Julian Symons, who certainly reviewed a lot of police procedurals over the years, defined the sub-genre as novels concentrating on "the detailed investigation of a crime from the point of view of the police."  Th ..read more

Agatha Christie Pecks at the keys 'bout a murder in her mind she's seen Death lives in her dreams There's a face at the window A man's holding a knife that is all red and crusted with gore Who is it for? All those lovely murders How did she think them up? All those lovely murders On blood tonight we'll sup! Ah, try to solve those lovely murders! Ah, just try to solve those lovely murders! --with apologies to Paul McCartney Inside, if this was the first time you visited Bertram's, you felt, almost with alarm, that you had re-entered a vanished world.  Time had gone back.  You were in ..read more

"How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!...For thou has said in thine heart, I will ascend into Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God...."--Isaiah 14:12-13 (Bible, KJV) bobbing for apples in 1969 I think Agatha Christie's Halloween Party--I'm going to drop the apostrophe for ease--a seriously underrated book.  As Christie aged in the 1960s her mystery plots became less tidy and Halloween Party is no exception in this regard, though it's a masterpiece of construction compared with By the Pricking of My Thumbs or Postern of Fate. (Sorry Tommy ..read more

If one looks over Agatha Christie's Miss Marple mysteries one sees that they tend to come in bunches. Thus we have: 1920s/30s The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) The Thirteen Problems, aka The Tuesday Club Murders (1932) (collection of short stories originally published between 1927 and 1931) 1940s Sleeping Murder (1940?, published in 1976)) The Body in the Library (1942) The Moving Finger (1943) 1950s A Murder Is Announced (1950) They Do It with Mirrors (1952) A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) 4.50 from Paddington (1957) 1960s The Mirror Crack's from Side to Side (1962) A Caribbean Mystery (1964) At ..read more

The penultimate Tommy and Tuppence Beresford mystery, By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) was published five years before their final adventure, Postern of Fate (1973), reviewed here, and reflects the author's greater control over her narrative powers in her late seventies compared with her early eighties.  The narrative has a far clearer beginning and end, though it bogs down in the middle, as was Christie's wont in her later novels.   From At Bertram's Hotel on, pretty much all of her books, with the exception of the suspense novel Endless Night (1967), get muddled in th ..read more

I. BABY BUNDLES IN BALTIMORE The discovery, a bloodcurdling one, made newspaper headlines in April 1950. The previous year thirty-eight-year-old divorcee Marie Plage and her seventeen-year-old daughter Janie had moved into the small second-story apartment in a somewhat decrepit three-story row house at 1804 East Pratt Street in downtown Baltimore.  Marie had parted ways with her husband of nearly two decades, Richard Plage, who had worked as a bus driver and as a chauffeur with the Diamond Cab Company.  Marie herself now operated a sewing machine in a factory while Janie completed he ..read more

"It's the great thing you have to have in life.  Hope.  Remember?  I'm always full of hope." ***** "Ah, well--what fun it is, all the things one used to invent and believe in and play at."   ***** "You must try and remember names better." ***** "Oh, dear, I must think what I'm doing." ***** "It really is most exhausting writing everything down.  Every now and then I do get things a bit wrong, don't I?" ***** "Fancy you remembering that.... Yes, I know.  One's always surprised when one remembers something." --Tommy and Tuppence Beresford in Agatha's Christie ..read more