Reviews

‘a delightful amateur sleuth novel with a well balanced mix of domestic and academic life and a strong sense of place.’ [Stage Fright]

- EUROCRIME.CO.UK

Thrilled!

I was in Waterstone’s Piccadilly on Tuesday and Barry Forshaw’s Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide caught my eye. I’d been meaning to buy a copy since it came out towards the end of last year. It’s the kind of book I love: short reviews of hundreds of books, accounts of different trends in crime fiction, […]

We seek him here . . .

Posted on Jan 24, 2020 in Baroness Orczy, Scarlet Pimpernel | 8 Comments

. . . We seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere . . .’ My blog friend, Moira at the excellent Clothes in Books, also now my friend in real life, has sent me a copy of a splendid book, Bestseller by Claud Cockburn, subtitled ‘The Books Everyone Read 1900-1939,’ which discusses novels like Beau […]

Murder in Mind

I didn’t get round to posting my talk on Helen McCloy, which I gave at Bodies from the Library last year. So here it is now. The title is ‘Murder in Mind: The Crime Novels of Helen McCloy.’ My attention was first drawn to Helen McCloy when her novel, Mr Splitfoot, was listed by H. […]

Goodbye, Inspector Morse. Hello, Lewis.

Posted on Jan 8, 2020 in Inspector Morse, John Thaw, Lewis | 12 Comments

Rather fittingly, I watched the last episode of Inspector Morse on New Year’s Eve. The first had aired in 1987 and this final one in 2000. I’d worked my way through all thirty-three in four or five months. By the end, the power-dressing of the 1980s was long gone and mobile phones were no longer […]

The glory that was Greece

For me one of the stand-out exhibitions of last year was Troy: Myth and Reality, which I saw at the British Museum a couple of weeks ago. There are some stunning objects – the vases in particular – and it was wonderful to revisit the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I had a grammar […]