Classic crime in the blogosphere, October 2013

Finnish blogger pulpetti is preparing a book on British paperback crime writers. This month he wrote a short entry on Peter Chester, aka Dennis Phillips.

October was another bumper month for classic crime reviews. I’ve listed everything I noted down, and here are some first-time offenders I thought worth highlighting:

quiteirregular hosted an entertaining guest blog by lawyer, sailor and writer A. J. Hall, who looked at Dorothy L. Sayers’ Five Red Herrings (1931) – her (to be honest, pretty boring) attempt at a ‘pure puzzle’ mystery.

Not only does this mean lists of railway times and connections on every other page, it produces scenes set at drinks parties where characters earnestly discuss why they ought to have caught the 7.30am express from Dumfries, rather than the ghastly 11.22am, or connected with the 1.46pm by taking the 10.56am from Gatehouse of Fleet. Though we’ve all been to parties like that, they don’t tend to be either lingered over at the time or fondly remembered in retrospect.

Hall also notes:

Most of the railway lines she describes in meticulous detail fell to the Beeching axe in 1965 (several had ceased to operate earlier). If one goes up to Kirkcudbright these days, one travels through a landscape filled with mysterious earthworks, their slopes overgrown with gorse, dotted with odd remnants of ruined masonry. British Rail blew its bridges behind it when it retreated from Galloway.

The blogger perinvitus reluctantly reviews movies, and early in the month looked at the Boulting brothers’ adaptation of Brighton Rock (1947), which starred Richard Attenborough as junior psychopath Pinkie:

Attenborough never seems to blink. He is cold, calculating, and capricious. He has an affinity for cats’ cradles and hats that shadow his face, giving him a Harvey Dent-esque umbral sinisterness. Here though he misses his bottled acid, which he brandished menacingly in the book, and which for me was a symbol of his hatred of the world around him – desiring, as he does, to disfigure it. Attenborough is menacing with his razor nonetheless.

Finally, the TLS can hardly be called a newcomer, or even a blog, but it did publish a good piece on the recent reissues of British writer Gerald Kersh by publishers Valancourt and London Books.

These reissues are signs of a revival of interest in this strange and compelling writer whose ramshackle cv included stints as a cinema manager, bodyguard, debt collector, fish frier, travelling salesman, teacher of French and all-in-wrestler.

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See also:

Annabel’s House of Books

• Lawrence Block’s Burglars Can’t be Choosers (1977)

A Penguin a Week

• Famous Trials 10
• Earl Stanley Gardner’s The DA Calls a Turn (1947)

Battered, Tattered, Yellowed and Creased

• George Harmon Coxe’s Man on a Rope (1956)

Beneath the Stains of Time

• Carter Dickson’s She Died a Lady (1943)
• H. R. F. Keating’s Zen There Was Murder (1960)
• Max Murray’s The Voice of the Corpse (1948)

Bitter Tea and Mystery

• Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)

Clothes in Books

• Irene Adler
• Edmund Crispin’s Holy Disorders (1946)

Col’s Criminal Library

• Jim Thompson’s The Rip-Off (1985)

Confessions of a Mystery Novelist

• Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939)

The Dusty Bookcase

• Hallan Whitney’s Backwoods Hussy (1952)

In Search of the Classic Mystery

• Christopher St. John Sprigg’s Fatality in Fleet Street (1933)

My Reader’s Block

• Anthony Gilbert’s Death Knocks Three Times (1949)
• Q. Patrick’s Murder at Cambridge (1932)
• Simon Nash’s Dead of a Counterplot (1962)

The Passing Tramp

• Cornell Woodrich’s Mystery in Room 913 (1938) and Murder, Obliquely (1958)
• Craig Rice’s The Fourth Postman (1948)

Perinvitus

• Brighton Rock (1947)

Pretty Sinister Books

• The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook
• Rupert Penny’s Policeman’s Holiday (1937)

Pulpetti

• Peter Chester’s Murder Forestalled (1960)

quiteirregular

• Dorothy L. Sayers’ Five Red Herrings (1931)

Riding the High Country

• Movie: The Mask of Dimitrios  (1944)

At the Scene of the Crime

• Richard Stark’s The Score (1963)
• Mickey Spillane’s One Lonely Night (1951)

Tipping My Fedora

• Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock (1946)
• Michael Gilbert’s Death in Captivity (1952)
• S. S. Van Dine

TLS

• Gerald Kersh

Vanished into Thin Air

• Agatha Christie’s Curtain – Poirot’s Last Case (1975)
• Norman Berrow
• The Edward D.Hoch Locked Rooms List

Vintage Pop Fictions

• R. Austin Freeman’s The Mystery of 31 New Inn (1912)
• J. J. Connington’s The Castleford Conundrum (1932)
• John Ulrich Giesy and Junius B. Smith’s The Complete Cabalistic Cases of Semi Dual (1912)
• Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table (1936)
• H. C. Bailey’s Mr Fortune, Please (1927)

Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog

• Dick Francis’ Odds Against (1965)
• Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone (1977)

You Book Me All Night Long

• Isaac Asimov’s A Whiff of Death