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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Anna Dowdall’s third novel April on Paris Street is a literate and attractively convoluted murder mystery, with this odd wrinkle: The murder doesn’t happen until near the very end of [...]
In his story collection Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret, Chicagoan Tim Jones-Yelvington zestfully recasts gay men and boys in the central roles of a surprisingly wide array [...]
Richard Carrington has been called a naturalist and a naturalist-historian. But, above all, he’s a writer. In his 1957 Mermaids and Mastodons, he writes about creatures and events from millions [...]
Well, I was at the Newberry Library Book Fair at the end of July, and my eye was caught by the cover of Walt Huffine’s 1970 Alabam McCall. It showed [...]
