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Mike Ripley is well-known for writing the Albert Campion continuation novels, but today’s read, a standalone modern mystery, is my first experience of his work. I was intrigued by the premise of Buried Above Ground, and it has a character who is a Golden Age Detective fiction blogger, so it was a hard one to pass up! In the author’s note, Ripley states that ‘this is not a conven...

It has been about a year since I have read a book by Ethel Lina White. My copy of The Third Eye is from the Paperback Library Gothic series, a series whose covers have not done White any favours. Instead, I feel this style of art has put some readers off from trying her work at all, a situation I would say is paralleled by Charlotte Armstrong who also suffered from 60s reprint c...

Last month I published the first in a series of posts taking a look at some of Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s opinions on crime fiction. A Catalogue of Crime has reviews for thousands of titles, so to make the task more manageable I have decided to explore them alphabetically. In my previous post I surveyed authors beginning with A, so naturally in today’s post it is...

Today I am reviewing the second book in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series, which has 13 titles altogether. This is my first time reading a mystery by this author. I particularly liked the quote by Dr Samuel Johnson, which the novel starts with: ‘Sir, he who would earn his bread writing books must have the assurance of a duke, the wit of a courtier, and the guts of a burglar.’ He...

As part of my book group I have compiled a few “Top 10” or “Top 5” lists and some of these have been very hard to put together, as invariably I have so many books I want to include. To date there are lists for my favourite 1920s, 1930s and 1940s mysteries. Today’s post on standalone mysteries was possibly the hardest to decide upon as there was no decade restriction to help narr...