I knew ahead of time the solution to the puzzle that Frederic Brown’s on-the-wagon Chicago reporter Bill Sweeney was trying to solve in The Screaming Mimi, and I still found the book’s ending to be quite effective. To back up a moment: Earlier...
As I was finishing John Grisham’s 1992 gripping legal thriller The Pelican Brief, I found myself warmly enjoying its reminder of how wonderful newspapering used to be. The novel starts with the assassination of two U.S. Supreme Court Justices and...
Robert Ludlum had a knack for writing successful and very popular thrillers, producing 27 books with a total of somewhere between 300 million and 500 million copies in print. That resulted in a ton of money, and what’s notable is that...
Some background: More than four centuries ago, during the Protestant Reformation, Scottish reformer John Knox published, while exiled in Switzerland, a small 20,000-word book that has kept his name alive ever since — The First Blast of the...
I suspect that Charles Dickens was in a pretty foul mood when he wrote “Hard Times” in 1854. He draws stark differences between the “good” people and the “bad” people in this story and assigns bleak fates to...
Philip Roth’s short novel Everyman, published in 2006 when the author was 73, is a bleak, blunt meditation on aging, the deterioration of the human body and the imminence of death. It tells of an unnamed 71-year-old man who, in the opening pages...
Odyssey By Patrick T. Reardon . Face of God, name of God, child death in every home, Egyptian, Israelite, Canaanite — let people go — sea split, walled water, tabernacle and gold god, frogs, lice, hail, locusts, boils, blood, blood...
The Cave at Altamira, published in 1998 by Harry N. Abrams, is a celebration by scholars from several fields of the artistic wonders of a meandering cave near the small town of Santillana del Mar along the farthest northern edge of Spain, not far...
Bourbon Street, New Orleans, the night before the Chicago Bears won the 1986 Super Bowl, 46-10 By Patrick T. Reardon . George could not suppress his animal glee, eyes filled with the sun of the Bears, his blinding trip to the mountain top, as...
In the fall of 2003, Sebastian Smee, the art critic of the Daily Telegraph in London, described a mid-19th century painting by British artist J. M. W. Turner as “an almost unbelievable vision of swirling blue, orange and white light thrusting...
Historian Lyndal Roper published her biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet in 2016, but, even as it was going to press, she knew that there was more she had to address in the Protestant reformer’s life. That was because of a book that...
Carla Sawyer is a tall, smart-alecky 21-year-old who’s working for a landscaping company until she figures out what to do with her life. She’s on a job in one of the tonier areas of Marin County, north of San Francisco, at a not-terribly-toney...
The pain that S. Yarberry suffers as a transgender person is strikingly described in their new book of jagged, anguished poetry A Boy in the City. It is pain set within the context of other, related emotional torment, including the end of a...
In a writing career that spanned much of the 20th century, Howard Fast wrote some 76 novels, roughly one a year, starting in 1933. To avoid flooding his own market, Fast used pseudonyms for about a third of the books — Behn Boruch three times and...
Margery Allingham’s 1931 mystery Police at the Funeral is a truly excellent example of the genre — briskly told, peopled with interesting characters, investigated by a quirky non-detective and concluded with an out-of-left-field solution that is...
After Howie Harrington asked me if I would make this tribute to Marty Kirk — of course, I said “yes” — I read Ted Cirone’s short biography of his friend. (That’s Marty to the left in the banner image with Ted. ) And I rummaged around in my...
The Horizon Book of Daily Life in Ancient Egypt by Lionel Casson is a fine book. It’s just not what’s advertised. Or, at least, what I expected. Casson was a well-respected classicist, at the height of his career a half century ago when The...
Near the end of my hourlong walk around Graceland Cemetery the other day, I went past a stone obelisk, maybe 30 feet tall, and noticed this on the side: SANDRA E. RITTER NOV. 22, 1952 NOV. 27, 1952 SUSAN E. RITTER NOV. 22, 1952 The November date...
When last we saw Sammy Tiffin, he was the central character of Christopher Moore’s 2018 comic mystery-thriller-fantasy Noir which, as the name indicates, was a stab by Moore at writing like Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. Alas, as Moore...
At the start, Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, is running away. Later, he is running to — to the hospital. At the end, he is running willy-nilly, without direction, into the unknown. His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind...
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