Homicide: Life on the Streets
A few blogs ago I wrote about what we’d be watching now that Wallander and Dr Who have finished. We are pressing on with our American film noir season – enjoyed THIS GUN FOR HIRE based on a Graham Greene novel and starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake – but the other stand-bys are DVDs […]
Family Britain 1951-1957
David Kynaston’s history is a brick of a book, 697 pages long, plus notes and, though fascinating, it is not a quick read. I had it for only a limited time from the London Library so realised that I was going to have to take this seriously and devote all my reading time to it. […]
The Rector’s Daughter
This 1924 novel by F. M. Mayor was chosen by listeners to Radio 4 as a neglected classic in response to an appeal by OPEN BOOK and it is currently being serialized as A Book at Bed-Time. This got me thinking and I got my paperback copy – a Penguin Modern Classic – down from […]
Wallander and film noir
This blog is mostly about reading, and sometimes about writing, but I do watch DVDS and TV as well. I have tended though to watch less and less TV over the years. There is hardly anything I like these days, not even dramatizations of the classics. I prefer to hang on to my own idea […]
CADS
CADS stands for a periodical called Crime and Detective Stories, ‘an irregular magazine of comment and criticism about crime and detective stories,’ to use the editor’s own words. It arrives through my letter-box around twice a year and and as I never know when it is going to appear, it always comes as a pleasant […]
Colin Cotterill
When people hear that I write crime fiction, they often ask me ‘who’s your favourite crime writer?’ Immediately my mind goes blank. ‘Ruth Rendell? P. D. James? Ian Rankin?’ they prompt, taking pity on me. Well, yes, great writers, who have beguiled many a weary hour for me, but . . . By this time, […]
Rennie Airth
I may have mentioned Rennie Airth before, but I think he deserves a post all to himself. I have recently read with great enjoyment the last in his John Madden trilogy, THE DEAD OF WINTER. He is one of those writers whose novels I buy as soon as they go into paperback. The first and, […]
A Pound of Paper
I do tend to re-read quite a lot. There are books I can go back to again and again, some of them classics, such as MANSFIELD PARK, others my own discoveries, such as Joyce Dennys’s HENRIETTA’S WAR: NEWS FROM THE HOME FRONT 1939-1942 and HENRIETTA SEES IT THROUGH: NEWS FROM THE HOME FRONT 1942-1945. These […]