#GermanLitMonth: Pigeons on the Grass by Wolfgang Koeppen (1951)

Pigeons on the grass, that is how certain modern minds regarded people, while they strove to expose that which was senseless and apparently coincidental in human existence, to portray man as free of God, then to leave him fluttering about free in the void, senseless, valueless, free, and menaced by snares, prey to the butcher, …

Forgotten Book: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

A couple of years back, I read Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes which was not so much about a murder in a boarding school as a deconstruction of the process of detection where it was the limitations of the detective - subjectivity, prejudices, likes, dislikes, - that was interrogated. It was a novel that broadened …

A Paean to McCarthyism: Neither Five Nor Three by Helen MacInnes

I had only a vague idea of what McCarthyism was. There was a Hollywood Blacklist and there was some sort of persecution of Dashiel Hammett because of what was feared to be his communist leaning. That's it. So reading Helen MacInnes Neither Five Nor Three was like getting an education. I never knew that there …

Wolf! Wolf!: Anthony Gilbert’s Lady-Killer

Anthony Gilbert was one of the finds of last year. It is thus appropriate that the first mystery read this year be of hers. Anthony Gilbert was the pseudonym of  Lucy Beatrice Malleson and she was born almost at the fag end of the 19th century, in 1899. Her first published novel was The Man who …

The Spider caught in its Own Web: Murder of a Martinet

It was after midnight when Macdonald heard the faintest of faint sounds on the floor above. Indeed it was hardly a sound at all,more a tiny vibration which told of movement, as though all the resting floorboards communicated a change in stress. As always, after a period of silent waiting, Macdonald felt that faint stirring reflected in …