Devoted to mystery and detective fiction -- the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE November 1948. Cover by George Salter. Overall rating: **½ ROY VICKERS “The Death Position Enigma.” Department of Dead Ends story, Coincidence and a mistake combine to help solve an old murder case, Inverted detection. (2) GEORGES SIMENON “L Chateau de L’Arsenic.” A curious doctor takes it upon himself to investigate a [ ]
STEFANIE MATTESON Murder at Teatime. Charlotte Graham #2. Diamond, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1991. This second installment of the adventures of actress and movie star Charlotte Graham takes place in Maine, where a world-famous professor and expert on herbal remedies is poisoned by one of the products found growing in his own garden. [ ]
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini JOSIAH E. GREENE Madmen Die Alone. Morrow, hardcover, 1938. Joseph Parisi, a homicidal inmate at the Exeter Hospital insane asylum, turns up missing one night. Circumstances are such that it is unlikely he managed to escape on his own; and it appears the only person who [ ]
KENNETH ROBESON Red Snow. Doc Savage #24. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, July 1969. Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine, February 1935. A strange red snow that disintegrates everything in it path threatens America’s defenses and it is up to Doc Savage and his crew of assistants to find ist source, He actually gets [ ]
Reviewed by Tony Baer: JACQUES MESRINE The Death Instinct. Originally published in French as L Instinct de Mort. Filmed as L instinct de mort (released in English as Mesrine: Killer Instinct) is the first part of a 2008 French biographical crime film about Jacques Mesrine, a notorious real-life French gangster. Directed by Jean-François Richet and [ ]
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Marcia Muller GRAHAME GREENE The Ministry of Fear. Heinemann, UK, 1943. Viking Press, US, 1943. Penguin #530, US, 1946. Reprinted many times. Graham Greene has a rigid-and pretentious-habit of classifying his own work into two categories: entertainments and novels. While all of his work is suspenseful and contains [ ]
ALDEN NORTON, Editor Futures Unlimited. Pyramid T-2048; 1st printing, June 1969. Cover art by Peter Bramley. An uneven look at the future, mostly through the past and the eyes of followers of Verne and Wells, two names which are inadequate today for the purpose of the cover blurbs, Scrapes the bottom of the barrel [ ]
COMING SOON! August 12!!
MARY DURHAM, Mystery Writer: A Bio-Bibliographical Essay by Jamie Sturgeon. If you look in Hubin, the indispensable Crime Fiction Bibliography, amongst the authors, you will see the name Mary Durham, for eleven murder mysteries she had published in the United Kingdom between 1945 (Hate Is My Livery) and 1952 (The Devil Was Sick). No [ ]
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Marcia Muller GRAHAM GREENE The Third Man. Viking, US, hardcover, 1950. Reprinted many times. Rollo Martins, a somewhat drunken writer of westerns, has come to Vienna at the request of his old school friend, Harry Lime. Lime has suggested he might write a piece on the postwar international [ ]