2014 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge – status update

In short, status: failed.

The rules to the 2014 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge are explained over at My Reader’s Block. Basically I decided to complete the Silver bingo card which covers books first published in the period 1960 to 1989.

As you’ll see below, I haven’t done very well, partly because I haven’t read as much as usual this year, partly because I have been reading older books. Still, I’ll be giving it another whirl in 2015 (you can sign up for next year’s challenge here).

• Book with a colour in the title:
• Book published under more than one title:
• Book with a ‘spooky’ title:
• Book by an author you’ve read before: Agatha Christie’s The Clocks (1963)
• Book with a detective team: P. D. James’ A Taste for Death (1987)
• Book with an animal in the title: Philip Youngman Carter’s Mr Campion’s Falcon (1970)

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• Book set anywhere except the US or England: Len Deighton’s Mexico Set (1984)
• Book with a number in the title:
• Book that has been made into a movie:
• Book with a lawyer, courtroom, judge etc.:
• Book with a time, day, month, etc. in the title:
• Book with a place in the title: Len Deighton’s London Match (1986)

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• Book which involves a crime other than murder: Dick Francis’s The Danger (1983)
• Book that features food/cooks in some way:
• Book with an amateur detective:
• Book already read by a fellow challenger:
• One translated work:
• One book with a size in the title:

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• One locked room mystery:
• Book by an author you’ve never read before: Len Deighton’s Berlin Game (1984)
• Book with a man in the title:
• Book with a professional detective: Margery Allingham’s Hide My Eyes (1963)
• One short story collection:
• One medical mystery:

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• One academic mystery:
• One book with a method of murder in the title: Joan Hess’s Strangled Prose (1986)
• One country house mystery:
• Mystery that involves water: Peter Lovesey’s The False Inspector Dew (1982)
• Book set in England: Philip Youngman Carter’s Mr Campion’s Farthing (1969)
• One book written by an author with a pseudonym:

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• Book set in the entertainment world: Simon Brett’s What Bloody Man is That? (1987)
• One book with a woman in the title: Margery Allingham’s The China Governess (1963)
• One book that involves a mode of transportation:
• One book outside your comfort zone: Tom Sharpe’s Riotous Assembly (1971)
• One book that you have to borrow:
• One book set in the US: Hillary Waugh’s Prisoner’s Plea (1963)

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