#1937 Club: Seven Mysteries

I read a number of mysteries for the 1937 Club. Here they are in no particular order: The Elephant Never Forgets by Ethel Lina White The time is the Nineteen Thirties and Anna Stephanovich finds herself in Russia just when the Stalinist purges are beginning and everybody seems to be on the edge. Anna, who …

#1937 Club: The Pendleton Fortune by D.C.F. Harding

I was so looking forward to the 1937 Club, hosted by Karen and Simon and had read a few books for the same but so many things happened this week that I did not get the time to review them. But as the week draws to a close, here is the first book that I …

Friday’s Forgotten Book: Scandal at the Home Office by Frank A. Clement (1937)

This Friday's Forgotten Book happens to be an obscure title: Scandal at the Home Office by Frank A. Clement, published in 1937. Chief Commissioner of Police, Admiral Lord Arthur Kippering, has plans of an evening out. First theatre with his wife and daughter, Lady Doddington and then dinner. However, he receives a call from the …

Summer of 21

By sheer chance, both the novels that I read this week featured a 21 year old heroine and so I thought, I will write about them together. Zella Blunt, the female protagonist of Marie Belloc Lowndes' Who Rides on a Tiger stands to inherit one half of the prestigious country-house Jerricks after the demise of …

Friday’s Forgotten Books: Bury Him Darkly (1936) and The High Sheriff (1937) by Henry Wade

According to Wikipedia, Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, 6th Baronet KStJ CVO DSO (10 September 1887 – 30 May 1969), also known by his pen name Henry Wade, was Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire from 1954 to 1961. He was also one of the leading authors during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. It is his …

Three Vintage Mysteries

With little time to spare nowadays, here are brief reactions to reading of three mysteries. BATS IN THE BELFRY by E.C.R. LORAC (1937) The question that perplexed me after finishing Lorac's Bats in the Belfry was that how could a novel that began so promisingly, that had me gripped almost its entire length, end on …

Forgotten Book: The Third Eye by Ethel Lina White (1937)

In 2012, Curtis Evans reviewed Ethel Lina White's 1937 novel The Third Eye, very-very favourably (read his review here). As I had liked all the books that I had read of White till then it immediately went on my wish-list. But it is  only now that Project Gutenberg, Australia has made it available (along with …

Forgotten Books: The Burning Court and The Black Spectacles by John Dickson Carr

You know how it is: You read about a book somewhere, it might be just a passing reference and  not a full-fledged review but it intrigues you so much that you want to read the book. So it was that I read a line from The Burning Court @ Classic Mystery Hunt ...and I simply …

H is for Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes

Michael Innes (J.I.M Stewart) is one of my favourite Golden-Age writers and there was a time when I read his books one after the other till I ran through all the titles the various libraries (I frequent) had on their shelves. After all these years, the titles and the plots are a little hazy but …