Just a short review from me today. I picked up this book around Christmas time, and it is the first in the Dickens and Christie mystery series. Dickens is a dog, whilst Christie is a cat, and they are the pets of Leta Parker. The premise of this series seems to be that Leta has some kind of Dr Dolittle thing going on with her pets. As a cat owner, I am a little bit jealous of th...

I picked up a free copy of this book last year, in a somewhat woe-begotten state (hence it being free I suppose). Henry Fitzgerald Heard (who wrote some of his books under the name of Gerald Heard) had a career which spanned across a lot of different mediums. He was a historian, broadcaster, lecturer, and author. Regarding this latter job, his writing covered nonfiction and fict...

This is my third read by this author, the other two titles being, A Gentle Murderer (1951) and Death of an Old Sinner (1957). The Saturday Review of Literature seems to have enjoyed this one opining that: ‘Sequence of widows’ deaths give nice Jasper Tully of New York cops something to think about; lawyer Jimmie Jarvis also suavely cogitative; bright and witty, with A-1 character...

Last month I posted the first, in what will be a series of posts on Anthony Shaffer’s crime fiction reviews, collected in London Mystery Magazine. This was a quarterly magazine, so Shaffer reviewed a lot of books each time, so I won’t be going into all of them. The authors I highlight will mostly be ones that I am less familiar with or completely new to. In my previous post I lo...

Unusually for Carnac (a.k.a. E. C. R. Lorac) this is an impossible crime mystery. Martin Edwards, in his introduction to the British Library reprint, shares that ‘the American edition, which appeared in 1957, was given a new title, The Late Miss Trimming.’ Regarding the impossible crime aspect, he opines that: ‘Carnac was a very different writer from, say, John Dickson Carr.  H...