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 […]
Truly a Reading Life
While shelving books of poetry on my new bookshelves, I came across a copy of a Penguin Classic, The Last Poets of Imperial Rome. I seemed to remember that there was something special about it, and when I opened it, I found this inscription ‘To my dear friend, Chrissie, “Youth’s the season made for joy,” […]
GA crime fiction and Martin Edwards
The last year or two have been somewhat turbulent for me with a lot of challenges, not least the house move which I have written about in earlier posts. For comfort reading I have turned to Golden Age crime fiction and have read vast amounts of writers like Freeman Wills Crofts and George Bellairs. They […]
A grand day out
The last time I posted I mentioned that I had donated 350 of my husband’s books to Robinson College in Cambridge. Last week I returned to Cambridge, the city where Peter and I met and got married. His books have now been catalogued by Robinson’s splendid librarian, Judith Brown. I had lunch with her and […]