Friday’s Forgotten Book: Desire to Kill by Alice Campbell (1934)

Thomas Rostetter finds himself attending a party thrown by enfant terrible Dodo . The party consists of painters and writers and spiritual gurus and their disciples, all of whom are painted in mostly negative terms except for the American girl, Dinah Blake, a budding painter. The 'saintly' Dinah has been badly hurt by Dodo who …

Friday’s Forgotten Books: Two Books by Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell

I have been facing a major blogging block but now the review pile has grown so big that I must really start writing or else... Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell are new authors for me. Little information is available on the duo except that both worked at the BBC, Marvell's real name was Eric Mashwitz, …

Friday’s Forgotten Book: Weekend at Thrackley by Alan Melville (1934)

I enjoyed Alan Melville's Death of Anton so much that I was keen to read more of him and decided on this because I really need a weekend away from the nightmare that we are living right now. Jim Henderson has been trying to survive in the Post WWI years. Without any stable job and …

The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent by E.P. Oppenheim (1934)

I am very fond of mysteries set in hotels. A group of disparate people, strangers to each other, staying under the same roof and interacting with each other makes for some lively reading as most of them they are pretending to be what they are not. The travelling salesman turns out to be a spy; …

The US in the Thirties: The Thin Man, and The Devil To Pay

The stock-market crash of October 1929 destroyed economies all over the world. Hunger, poverty, and unemployment rose and heralded in what is called The Great Depression. I recently read two mysteries written by American authors in the thirties and it was interesting to see how they reflected the tenor of the times.Cover Image: Photo of …