After a long time, we return to review a novel by Anthony Abbot. In this case of the eight novels he published, this is the penultimate. The Creeps, original title, written in 1938, was published in 1939. It is a novel with a great atmosphere, which seems to be different from the other six first novels. WARNING: SPOILERS !!! Thatcher Colt is no longer Chief of the NYPD. He retired to private life and got married. His wife Florence thinks that he is bored without being able to dedicate himself to solving some good case, and so she does everything to get them to agree to go to his relatives i ..read more

    Willoughby Sharp... who could he be? one could say paraphrasing Alessandro Manzoni. The great tomes of detective literature, dictionaries like the Maspléde do not report it, in GAD there is not a page that concerns it, in Mike Grost's analytical work on the internet, ditto. Yet he is an author of the golden age of the Golden Age of Detection, of the full Thirties. What we know about the author we learn from the notes on the cover flap: William Willoughby Sharp born in 1900 and died in 1956, he was a New Yorker. Son of high society, he found work on the Wall Street Stock Exchang ..read more

  One of the best Locked Rooms ever  Even from the first lines we see projected on a remote island, battered by gales, which has a name that says it all: Kraken, like the mythological monster of the deep sea. And the atmosphere already expresses its first signs ofstrange and threatening. Nancy Garwood, actress and showgirl, is found lying across the bottom of the bed, still wearing the evening dress and and then she do ..read more

    In the spring of 1972, the British publishing company Jonathan Cape Ltd together with The Times of London announced a literary competition, centered on an unpublished detective story: the winner would win the publication of a novel. The jury was very respectable: Agatha Christie president, the playwright and screenwriter (Sir) Tom Stoppard, John Higgins of the Times, Tom Maschler of the Cape, Lord Butler, President of the Royal Society of Literature and Principal of Trinity College, Cambridge. Out of more than 1000 stories submitted, about ten were chosen, and among these the w ..read more

        Carr's story that leads the way to the entire collection of short stories, pastiches, radio plays and essays contained in The Door To Doom is  As Drink The Dead , The Haverfordian 1926. It is an extraordinary story, which mixes supernatural atmospheres, impossible crimes and historical research. Two men are talking in a hall: one, with a shaggy beard, thin and bony, whom people called "the Old German Gnome", is a man of letters; the other with white robes and white hair, is a holy man. From the windows you can admire a typically Italian countryside landscape. T ..read more

    John Rhode alias Miles Burton were the two pseudonyms used by Cecil John Charles Street (Gibraltar, 1884-Eastbourne, 1964), to write Mystery: the first being used for the series with Sir Lancelot Priestley, retired scientist, the second for the one with Desmond Marrion, former Naval Officer. Before dedicating himself to writing he was first an artillery officer and then an officer in MI7, the Counterintelligence of the time. He wrote many novels, and this penalized him because he could not always maintain a certain narrative and inventive quality. However, a good number of nov ..read more

  Margaret Erksine (aka Margaret Doris Wetherby Williams), wrote 21 detective stories featuring Inspector Septimus Finch, between 1938 and 1977. She was born on May 2, 1901 in the city of Kingston, Ontario, Canada but grew up in Devon, England. She died on July 9, 1984. One might think that she was of Canadian origins, but this is not the case: her parents were temporarily in Canada and therefore she was born there, but in reality they were English: her father was Thomas Wetherby Williams and her mother Elizabeth Erskine. On her father's side he was descended from Thomas Williams (173 ..read more

    The novel was first serialized in magazines in 1950-1951 and then published later. A famous film by Japanese filmmaker Kon Ichigawa was made from the novel. The novel is written and set in the period following the end of World War II. WARNING: SPOILERS Detective Kosuke Kindaichi is reached by a letter from a certain Wakabayashi Hoichiro who begs him to join him in Nasu (Tochigi Prefecture, Honshu Island), a small town on the lake of the same name, to investigate a hereditary succession which according to the sender could be at the basis of a feud. As soon as he arrives at the h ..read more

      Tom Mead is a dear friend. We've known each other for a few years. Friendship born on Facebook, but not like many others: deepened and marked by readings and discussions. He remembered me because years ago in an anthology by John Pugmire & Brian Supkin a story of mine with a classic locked room had appeared, he told me that he really liked it and asked me if I had written anything else. I told him that I had written many short stories, some published in the past and many unpublished, and that I had also written a novel, which probably would never be published, with t ..read more

      Ellery Queen's novel that ended the legendary first ten novels, Halfway House,  is a novel that contains many interesting things. Let's see why. First of all, the introduction, always signed by the elusive criminal lawyer friend of Ellery Queen (who also appears in Face to Face) provides a fact that otherwise we would not have known: the title clearly differs from the scheme adopted for the previous 9, but we do not know why. . In fact, J.J. McC. asks Ellery Queen: “As one of Ellery Queen’s more fanatical admirers I have long felt that if there was anything in this ..read more