Love and bullets – Classic crime in the blogosphere: February 2014

75 years ago this month, Raymond Chandler published The Big Sleep. To mark the occasion, Killer Covers presented a collection of designs including my favourite, this 2013 effort from Philippa “Pip” Watkins.

February -a short month, and relatively short on classic crime book reviews – finds itself distinguished by St Valentine’s Day about halfway through. So (it’s like shooting fish in a barrel) I’ve gone with the theme of love and marriage for this month’s round-up.

Sergio at Tipping My Fedora gave me the idea with a review of that charming old romantic James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice:

The narrator is Frank Chambers, a man in his early 20s drifting across depression-era America without plans or ambition who finds a dark kind of purpose when he meets Cora, the wife of Nick “The Greek” Papadakis, owner of a roadside cafe and filling station. Taken on to help run the joint, he and Cora quickly start a passionate affair, one that is described with detail that, for its day, was considered pretty racy (and even just a little bit Gothic/vampiric).

Moving on to Clothes in Books and one of Agatha Christie’s unlikely pairings: the elderly Aristide Leonides and his much younger ex-waitress wife Brenda in Crooked House (what first attracted you to the millionaire Aristide Leonides?):

Poor old Brenda – everyone looks down on her, because she is common and wears too much make-up and her hair is too elaborate. Christie has a go at making her human and real, but even her champion – narrator Charles – gives up on her in the end. She is repeatedly compared to Edith Thompson,* a real person who was executed in 1923 for the murder of her husband, but who was probably innocent. Brenda in the book is the young wife of aging patriarch Aristide Leonides, and when he is murdered she is the obvious suspect.

‘The Mrs Danvers is sweet really cover’: Annabel’s House of Books collected together a diverse bunch of covers for du Maurier’s Rebecca this month.

My Reader’s Block covered Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo’s Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (1946), a Golden Age mystery lent interest by its Argentine origins.

Dr. Humberto Huberman, physician, writer, and inveterate busybody, has gone to the Hotel Central at seaside Bosque de Mar for a literary vacation. He is in search of a quiet place to work on his adaptation of Petronius. But instead of peace and quiet, he finds himself in the middle of murder. A pretty, young translator named Mary is found dead on the very first night of his stay–apparently poisoned. There had been ripples of jealousy between Mary and her sister Emilia over Emilia’s fiance. There is also the matter of Mary’s missing jewels.

Nancy at The Crime Segments looked at one of Chandler’s lesser-read novels, The Little Sister, and that weary romantic Marlowe encountering one of the stranger names I’ve ever encountered:

Marlowe is back in #615 Cahuenga “stalking the bluebottle fly” that’s been buzzing around him for a while, when in walks Orfamay Quest, of whom Marlowe notes “nobody ever looked less like Lady Macbeth.” She’s not Marlowe’s usual fare — no make up, and rimless glasses that “gave her that librarian’s look.”

Finally, Margot at Confessions was on hand with one of her excellent thematic overviews: A box of chocolates and a dozen flowers:

It’s traditional to give a box of candy on Valentine’s Day. Now, far be it from me to discourage you from supporting the chocolate industry. Really. I mean it. But chocolate can be very dangerous stuff. Just ask Margaret de Rushbridger, who plays a role in Agatha Christie’s Three Act Tragedy (AKA Murder in Three Acts). She is a patient at a Yorkshire sanitarium run by eminent specialist Dr. Bartholomew Strange. One night, Strange suddenly dies of what turns out to be nicotine poisoning while he’s hosting a dinner party. Not long afterwards, Margaret de Rushbridger suddenly dies too, this time from chocolates poisoned by nicotine. As you might suspect, there is a connection, but not the one you may think. Hercule Poirot is already investigating Strange’s death and an earlier one that may be related. And in the end he links those deaths to that of Margaret de Rushbridger. See? If she’d just left the chocolates alone, she might have been fine.

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See also… (and as always, do give me a shout if I’ve missed something)

Annabel’s House of Books

• Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

Battered, Tattered, Yellowed and Creased

• Robert Colby’s The Captain Must Die (1959)

Beneath the Stains of Time

• Ed McBain’s Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (1960)
• Herbert Brean’s The Traces of Merrilee (1966)

Bitter Tea and Mystery

• Margaret Maron’s Death of a Butterfly (1984)

Clothes in Books

• Wilkie Collins’ No Name (1862)
• Agatha Christie’s Crooked House (1949)
• Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger (1945)

Col’s Criminal Library

• John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
• John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night (1965)
• Agatha Chrsitie’s Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979)

The Consulting Detective

• Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-02)

Crime Fiction Lover

• Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery (1892)

The Crime Segments

• Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake (1943)
• Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister (1949)

Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West

• Norbert Davis’ Doan and Carstairs (1940s)
• A Daffy Dill cover library

The Dusty Bookcase

• Ronald Cocking’s High Tide is at Midnight (1950)

The Game’s Afoot

• Georges Simenon’s The Madman of Bergerac (1932)

How Mysterious

• Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945)

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

• Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train (1932)
• Robert Barr’s The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont (1906)

Killer Covers

• Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep (1946)

My Reader’s Block

• Margot Arnold’s Exit Actors, Dying (1979)
• Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo’s Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (1946)
• Rex Stout’s Gambit (1962)
• D. B. Olsen’s Death Walks on Cat Feet (1956)
• Clyde B. Clason’s The Purple Parrot (1937)
• Ellery Queen’s 20th Anniversary Annual

Mysteries in Paradise

• Agatha Christie’s By the Pricking of my Thumbs (1968)
• Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Mews (1937)

Mystery*File

• John Buchan’s The Three Hostages (1924)

Only Detect

• Aaron Marc Stein’s Days of Misfortune (1949)
• Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Laughing Policeman (1968)

The Passing Tramp

• Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers and Russell Thorndike’s Six Against the Yard (1936)

A Penguin a Week

• Cyril Hare’s Suicide Excepted (1939)
• Roger Longrigg’s Daughters of Mulberry (1961)

Pretty Sinister Books

• R. B. Saxe’s The Ghost Knows His Greengages (1940)
• Victor L Whitechurch’s The Robbery at Rudwick House (1929)
• Carter Dickson’s My Late Wives (1946)
• Andrew Soutar’s Facing East (1936)

Reading Ellery Queen

• Ellery Queen’s The Adventure of the Three Lame Men (1934)

At the Scene of the Crime

• Father Brown (TV)
• Ngaio Marsh’s Dead Water (1963)

In Search of the Classic Mystery

• Peter Lovesey’s Bertie and the Tinman (1987)

Tipping my Fedora

• James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
• Ed McBain’s Let’s Hear it for the Deaf Man (1973)
• Police Python 357 (film, 1976)

Valerie Holmes, Author

• An interview with Peter Lovesey

Vanished into Thin Air

• John Sladek’s Black Aura (1974)
• John (Francis) Russell Fearn’s Within That Room! (1946)

Venture Galleries

• August Derleth’s Solar Pons

Vintage Pop Fictions

• Arthur Conan Doyle’s Great Tales
• T. Arthur Plummer’s The ‘J for Jennie’ Murders (1945)
• Ellery Queen’s The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932)

What are you Reading For?

• Nicolas Freeling’s The Back of the North Wind (1983)
• Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge (1954)

Wormwoodiana

• Joyce Carol Oates’ Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)

Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog

• Ruth Rendell’s The Veiled One (1989)

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Past Offences by Rich Westwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.