Reviews

‘One of those rare gems that comes to the reviewer out of the blue . . . enough twists to shame a cobra . . . the story fairly rips along, defying the reader to put the book down . . . Christine Poulson should be heralded as the fine entrant to the world of crime fiction she most certainly is.’ [Stage Fright]

- WWW.CHRISHIGH.COM

Brit Noir

Readers of this blog won’t be surprised to learn that I went shopping on Monday intending to buy a cardigan and came back with two books (and no cardigan). Worse: one of them was full of suggestions for more books to buy and read. But I couldn’t resist buying a copy of Barry Forshaw’s splendid Brit Noir: […]

Present tense? It’s happening right now!

Posted on Feb 20, 2016 in crime fiction, Present tense, Wolf Hall | 19 Comments

The other day I was browsing in a bookshop and picked up a crime novel that has been well reviewed. I opened it and it was written in the present tense. Back it went on the shelf. It was the same with the next one I looked at. Is it just me, or are more novels […]

Why don’t people close their curtains in crime dramas?

Posted on Sep 28, 2015 in Beck, clichés, crime fiction | 2 Comments

Time for some more crime fiction clichés. Last Saturday’s episode of Beck began with a gangster and his family narrowly escaping being shot. Later, at home at night, he is an easy target standing next to a picture window in a well-lit room and is picked off by a sniper. Surely closing the curtains or blind […]

Surprised by Agatha Christie

I have just read Agatha Christie’s autobiography. Two things surprised me. One was that she couldn’t remember anything about writing Peril at End House – one of her most ingenious and highly regarded novels. The other was that she was favourably inclined towards the death penalty. I wouldn’t have guessed that from her novels. She […]

Miss Marple: Proto-feminist? Scarcely, and yet . . .

I’ve been reading with great pleasure Virginia Nicholson’s excellent, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War. In a chapter on the stereotype of the spinster I was interested to come across this as an example: ‘Agatha Christie’s knitting detective Miss Marple incarnated the spinster sleuth.’ Last week I was reading The […]

Well, I’m back …

Posted on Oct 12, 2009 in crime fiction, sick room reading | No Comments

…and it’s been so long that I have almost forgotten how to blog. No sooner was I recovering from the car crash – plaster off and walking on crutches – than I caught swine flu -and so did my daughter. There have been other problems too which I can’t write about, because they involve someone […]