#1940 Club: He Looked for a City by A.S.M. Hutchinson

My last read for the #1940 club is of a once popular author, now fallen into obscurity. A.S.M. Hutchinson. Born in india in 1879, and later editor of the illustrated London newspaper, The Daily Graphic, Hutchinson was also a novelist of repute who wrote such best-sellers as If Winter Comes and This Freedom. The novel …

#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, …

#GermanLitMonth: Eagles of the Reich by Will Berthold (1957)

An officer who is prepared to die first can demand total loyalty, only he can take his men into the jaws of death. They are Goering's golden boys, the pride of the Luftwaffe, Germany's crack paratroopers known as the Green Devils. When the novel opens, we find a unit rearing to go to their next …

Friday’s Forgotten Book: … And Presumed Dead by Lucille Fletcher (1963)

The shadows stretched their arms to her. They cried in broken voices, just beyond, always beyond. There was no end. The ultimate cruelty, the ultimate uncertainty remained. The Indo-Pak war of 1971 resulted in the creation of Bangladesh (till then the East wing of Pakistan) and was won by India. However, like any other victory …

Women and War: E.C.R. Lorac’s Relative to Poison (1947)

The Ministry of Labour "directed" workpeople; her own daughters "registered" and performed strange tasks in strange uniforms. They "fire-watched", drove ambulances, ran rest centres - they were not their mistresses any longer. A new range of expressions like "points", "basic", "under the counter", "off the ration" developed. Elspeth Carndale is in a dillema. Her husband …

# The 1920 Club: E.P. Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation

The year is 1920. Kaiser Wilhelm II has abdicated. The Treaty of Versailles has been imposed signed. Contours and colours of possession have changed across the globe. The sun still doesn't set over the British Empire. Time perhaps to put the past behind... The Prince of Storytellers, however, has different ideas. In 1920 comes his …

Forgotten Book: Black-Out in Gretley by J.B. Priestley (1942)

Already he was somewhere else, muttering explanations in a German I couldn't follow. Suddenly he smiled, as if they were all friends again wherever he was and had begun playing Mozart, and a minute later he was dead.I stared from one to the other of these dead Germans, so far from anything they really understood, …

A Ghost in Pearls: Lost Among the Living by Simone St. James

Lost Among the Living by Simone St. JamesMy rating: 2 of 5 stars Random thoughts after reading Simone St. James' Lost Among the Living, a book listed on 50 Most Suspenseful Novels:1. Who makes these lists???????2. Why am I sucker for such lists??????3. If you are going to introduce the supernatural in a mystery, take …

1st september: War and Crime

The second world war is generally said to have began on this date in 1939. This year I have been reading quite a few mysteries that have the war setting the context of the novel. Elizabeth Farrars' Murder Among Friends which is set in London during the time of Blitz has already been reviewed. Here …

A Forgotten War: Easterine Kire’s Mari

When you go hometell them of usand say for your tomorrowwe gave our todayInscription on the war memorial of the 2nd Division at the Kohima War CemeteryThe Battle of Kohima was called the "Stalingrad of the East", so vital was it that the British wrest the land back from the Japanese who had conquered it. …