#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: An English Murder by Cyril Hare

Cyril Hare is the pseudonym of  Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, an English judge and writer of mysteries. I had heard of Hare but had not read him before reading his most popular book: An English Murder. First published in 1951, this is a Country House mystery in which the merry season of Christmas turns into …

Forgotten Book: Death in Retirement by Josephine Bell

Josephine Bell is the pseudonym of Doris Bell Collier Ball, a prolific writer of mysteries during the Golden Age of Detection. Having lost her father in childhood, the young Doris nonetheless followed his footsteps and went on to study medicine. Later on, she married fellow-doctor, Norman Dyer Ball, and the two set up a joint practice. …

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 …

Death of a Family: Andrea Maria Schenkel’s The Murder Farm

In a remote farmhouse, six people have been brutally murdered, two of them kids ( one of them barely out of the crib) and one a maid who had but joined the house-hold. The village community is shocked. Who could have been the devil to murder defenceless people thus? Andrea Maria Schenkel's award-winning debut novel, …