Last Read of 2021: In Andamans: The Indian Bastille by Bejoy Kumar Sinha (1939)

2021 is not ending on a good note and my last read of the year too was pretty grim in places. The Andamans are a group of islands in the Bay of Bengal off the eastern coast of India. Separated from mainland India, they are still home to the indigenous people who have been here …

Short Notes: Black Beadle by E.C.R. Lorac (1939)

Conversations, conversations, and still more conversations. I don't think I have ever read a mystery in which there were so many conversations between the various characters. At times, it seemed Lorac was writing a Novel of Ideas rather than a mystery. And the situation is definitely serious. It is 1939 and the Jewish Question is …

The House of Hapsburg: The Radetzky March, and Beware of Pity

"During the Serbian Campaign, when, after Potiorek's disastrous defeat, exactly forty-nine men out of our whole regiment, the Colonel's pride, retreated safely across the Save, he stayed behind to the last on the opposite bank; then, feeling that the panic-stricken retreat was a slur on the honour of the army, he did something that only …

In its 75th Year: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS SO PLEASE DON'T READ IT IF YOU HAVE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK AND HAVE NOT READ AND THEN THERE WERE NONE.I was in school when I first read And Then There Were None. Agatha Christie was already a great favourite and I was searching for all her books and reading them. …

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 …

Two Vintage Mysteries: The Secret Agent, and The Town Cried Murder

On 15th February, 1894, two members of the Greenwich Observatory  were startled by a 'sharp and clear detonation, followed by a noise like a shell going through the air'. Looking out, they observed the door porter running across the courtyard. Following him, they saw the warden of the Greenwich Park and some school boys, crowding …

Forgotten Books: Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout

I had heard of Rex Stout but had not realised how popular Nero Wolfe was before I started blogging. Last year then I read my first Wolfe: The Mother Hunt. I loved Archie's narrative skills but wasn't too enamoured of Wolfe's detection or the plot. Fellow mystery enthusiast, Rishi Arora @ Classic Mystery Hunt, then …

Viola!!! Anthony Gilbert’s The Clock in the Hat-Box

Shadows assumed fantastic proportions around me; the uncertainty of the future made me hear sounds that had no existence but in my own brain; a curtain moved; it might have been twitched aside by an invisible hand...Sometimes, one finds such gems. I had not even heard of Anthony Gilbert till a few weeks ago and then I …

A is for And Then There Were None

Eight people - strangers to each other - are invited to an island off the Devon coast. On arriving there, they are welcomed not by their hosts -who have unfortunately been delayed but would be joining them the next day - but by the serving couple. Strangely enough, all of them have only a hazy idea …

D is for Dogs

It is 1939. Europe is sitting on a tinder box. The year begins on a tragic note. Nobel Laureate W.B. Yeats, having already witnessed a world war and other dances of destruction closes his eyes forever. PoetW.H. Auden, having but recently shifted to New York, writes an elegy mourning not only the death of the …