Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes, by R. Austin Freeman The impossibly insightful detective is, of course, a staple of the mystery genre, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation being the archetype, though the lineage runs back to Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” in which the mental magic is performed by C. Auguste Dupin. Such a superhuman investigator always manages …
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All I ask from from Wacko literature—be it Conspiracy, Secret Society, or other weirdness—is that it a) make startling claims which are b) supported by intriguing evidence that c) almost makes me a convert. St. Paul in Britain succeeds on all three counts.
The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1942, by Anita Brenner, with 184 photographs compiled by George R. Leighton Proponents of revolution—or opponents, for that matter—might soberly consider the course of the Mexican Revolution, the first of the great revolutions of the 20th Century. Like the other revolts in Russia …
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2 novellas by Wilkie Collins: Miss Or Mrs? & The Guilty River How difficult it shall be in our ‘woke’ future to read the literature of the past! For, after ensuring that our book is printed appropriately with soy inks upon hempen paper, and reading beneath an LED bulb powered by solar light stored in …
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Hazell and the Menacing Jester, by P. B. Yuill [Gordon Williams & Terry Venables] I like reading books. Really, I do. I read for enjoyment, to learn stuff, to delay the inevitable minute when I have to return to work, and to distract myself when I’m sitting in the meditation chamber in my house. And …
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Ace Double Novel 37062: The Inheritors / The Gateway To Never, by A. Bertram Chandler Just a quick note about these two short novels that make up an Ace double that I recently devoured after pulling it down from my shelves. The book, an Ace Double published in 1972, presents two science fiction stories about …
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Turn On The Heat, by Erle Stanley Gardner Erle Stanley Gardner created more than the always triumphant lawyer Perry Mason. So prolific was the writer-lawyer that he fed the pulps with stories from the pseudonymous pens of over a half dozen noms de plume, creating dozens of characters pleasing readers of mysteries and westerns for …
The Ragged World: A Novel of the Hefn on Earth, by Judith Moffett This ‘fix-up’ novel* about the interactions between Earth people and ecological aliens was so ponderous and so swathed in psychobabbulous platitudes that I almost began to sympathize with the Sad Puppies.† Almost. Even this pointless set of interminable tales of deus ex …
I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept. The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, by Marjorie Kelly Returning to a book almost twenty years after its release may bring many pleasures, surprises, or insights. Reading an author’s words decades after they were written may cause us to nod our heads in …
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The Camp-Meeting Murders, by Vance Randolph & Nancy Clemens A fairly pedestrian mystery story is enlivened by its depiction of small-town life in the South and by the peculiar spinster narrator, Bedelia Alcott, who plays the traditional part of the clueless detective in her misguided musings about the central crime, the murder of a Holy …
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