In today's edition of nobody-gives-a-damn, I've made slight adjustments to the Goodnight Irene cover. It's a bit brighter, title's bigger, my name's bigger, one new review quote, and I cleaned up the remaining quotes (removed ellipses and .coms, reformatted). Anything to take time away from working on the new book. Sigh... This should be available… Continue reading Slightly revamped Irene cover
What present to get for the mystery fanatic in your life? A week ago, mysteriesahoy! published an unboxing video of crossexaminingcrime's coffee and crime box. (By the by, you should be reading their blogs instead of mine.) It looked cute, I had a birthday coming up...why not? The package came rather quickly—all the way from… Continue reading Coffee and Crime Box
Fellers were money for jam, thought Sari, compared with trying to enchant small girls. Really one felt sorry for poor exhausted paedophiles... That's just one of the many lines in Christianna Brand's 1979 novel The Rose in Darkness that sent me into a fit of cackling delirium. Brand who can nail a characterization with the… Continue reading The Rose in Darkness
On this point, the author feels he may have been unfair to the reader. However, he believes that it will not cause any lasting damage to those with a vivid imagination. So writes Soji Shimada in the solution chapter of his locked-room mystery, Murder in the Crooked House. Whether this is a cop out (perfectly-tuned… Continue reading Murder in the Crooked House
Richard Forrest's 1975 novel is a an example of the "impossible crime thrown in at the last minute" (sub)subgenre of mystery. It begins with the discovery of three skeletons (1 man, 1 woman, 1 child) on a ridge in Murphysville, Connecticut. A doll clutched in the tiny skeleton's arms and the dental work on the… Continue reading Child’s Garden of Death
James Scott Byrnside 