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' classic crime fiction reissues because he saw and objected to a comment I made on a Lee Goldberg Facebook post about Otto's history of egregious sexist comments.  My grave crime was that I had commented that retrograde attitudes like the ones Otto expressed on women mystery writers back in the 1990s helped explain how a hideously homophobic book like Francis Nevins' Cornell Woolrich biography was published.  (Mysterious Press was the publisher.)&n ..read more

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 Inversion and The House of Stairs--in just three years between 1986 and 1988.  She was then at the height of her powers and it shows in this terrific trio ..read more

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 Mitchell (not to mention later-comers Margaret Erskine, Christianna Brand and E ..read more

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 Detective Fiction, as I call it (I don't know whether it's caught on with anyone else yet), roughly from 1950 to 1990.  The Silver Age gets little attention relative to the Golden Age, though it produced a host of wonderful crime writers, like (aside from Aird) Edmund Crispin, Julian Symons, Andrew Garve, Michael Gilbert, HRF Keating, Elizabeth Ferrars, Christianna Brand, Patricia Moyes, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Sara Woods, Anne Morice, Margaret Yorke, P ..read more

"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." All my life, I've been just as friendly and polite as a fella could be.  I've always figured that if a fella was polite to everyone, why, they'd be nice to him.  But it don't always work out that way.   It was a kind of hard fact to face--that I was just a nothing doing nothing.   But we're a real God-fearin' community, like you've probably gathered. They were all ask ..read more

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.   Since in the United States a month ago--Has it been a month already?--Americans elected as president, for the second time, an unashamed, unregenerate grifter, a cynical purveyor of Trump guitars and Trump watches and Trump bobbleheads and Trump bullshit, I thought it would b ..read more

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 which published five years earlier.   The Lenient Beast received good reviews when it wa ..read more

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. My favorite pb edition of the novel though I own the early Eighties ed. by Quill, where series editor Otto Penzler gives himself a bio on the front endpaper right below the author's bio.  Modest, huh? Night of t ..read more

Michigan writer and intellectual Russell Kirke (1918-1994) has been called the 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).  Detective fiction, as we know here, often has been called an inherently conservative form; and so has been termed supernatural fiction.  One of the most interesting pieces in Kirk's first supernatural s ..read more

I looked into the biographical information on Fredric Brown over the weekend and found a lot of it was wrong.  So I thought I would go over some of it here.  It strikes me that "Brownie," to use his high school nickname (though in fact he was blond), was one of the 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 he should.   The hard-boiled triumvirate of Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald seems, after a half-century or more, inviolable, while in noir Highsmith ..read more