Crime for Christmas: Five favourite festive reads
Crime for Christmas: Five Festive Reads: here they are in order of publication Dorothy L Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934). Ok, so not Christmas exactly, but close enough. It is a snowy New Year’s Eve when Lord Peter Wimsey runs his car into a ditch near the village of Fenchurch St Paul. I regularly reread […]
A good way to spend an autumn afternoon
My last post was about buying new books. It’s a great pleasure, but perhaps not quite such a pleasure as a trip to a second book shop and finding books that you didn’t even know you wanted as well as some that you did. Last Friday I needed cheering up and, as I had to […]
A Wonderful Tribute
Yesterday was the first day of an exhibition at Sheffield University of material from the archive of my late husband: Peter Blundell Jones: Architecture, Landscape and the City. I went to see it with our younger daughter (there will be an official opening later in the year). It covers the whole range of Peter’s work, […]
Josephine Tey, P.D. James – and me
DEATH AMONG THE DONS Part 2 One of my favourite novels with an academic setting is Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946), which is set in an female physical training college. Hers is in many ways an affectionate portrait. Tey had herself attended just such a college, Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham, and had […]
Death Among the Dons
A couple of years ago, I gave a talk at Alibis in the Archives at the Gladstone Library and promised to post it on my blog. What with a house move and other distractions, it slipped my mind. But here is a edited version of it – or some of it. It is rather long, […]
Revisiting old friends
Recently I was asked to write about three books or writers that I return to again and again. It was hard to choose just three, because I do a lot of rereading, particularly at times of great stress or illness. And my house move certainly counts as one of those times. Anyway, this is what […]
Something old, something new …
A couple of weeks ago I was thrilled to receive a review copy of Clifford Witting’s, Silence After Dinner, the latest of his crime novels to be published by the splendid Galileo Publishers. It isn’t strictly speaking Golden Age, as it was published in 1953, but it’s very much in the GA spirit. It opens […]
Peter Lovesey
For me as for many other crime-writers a shadow fell across the day last Friday when I heard that Peter Lovesey had died. He was a giant among crime-writers and won every award going, sometimes more than once. But that is not why he is so much mourned in the crime-writing community. It is difficult […]
A little bit of buried treasure
‘Un petit pincement au coeur’ can be translated as ‘a little pang in the heart’. Years ago I was on holiday in France and read a notice on the door of a shop that had recently closed. It explained that the owners had retired, thanked all their customers and said that every Christmas they would […]