Patrick T. Reardon

I ordered Ed Hulse’s The Art of Pulp Fiction: An Illustrated History of Vintage Paperbacks and started reading it soon after it arrived. The text is a lively discussion of [...]

Jane Ward’s In the Aftermath is an earnest, even affecting examination of the strong waves of guilt, sadness and anger among family and friends that follow the suicide of a [...]

Detective Cotton Hawes gets off on the wrong foot when he’s transferred from the cushy, affluent 30th precinct to the rough and tumble 87th. He knocks on a door and [...]

In the final pages, the Discworld does not end, and everything comes down to a copper doing his job and to what is described as “the peculiar mathematics of heroism.” [...]

In 1937, Agatha Christie published Death on the Nile in which her detective Hercule Poirot has to solve a whole bunch of puzzling murders while on a river steamer cruise. [...]

Madam Frout, headmistress of the Frout Academy and pioneer of the Frout Method of Learning Through Fun, is pretty dopey in an over-educated way.  As Terry Pratchett explains in his [...]

In a real way, Jennifer T. Roberts’ Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction is a 112-page blurb for the great Greek historian’s Histories. Written around 430 BC, The Histories — which, [...]

Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues, liked to spend money on herself and on her friends, such as Ma Rainey, a blues mentor, who got into trouble one evening with [...]