Reviews

‘Footfall is as engaging as it gets. Cassandra James is . . . a terrific character, beautifully honed from seemingly staid academic to feisty heroine . . . a truly breathtaking read.’

- TANGLED WEB

Treasure

You know how it is sometimes when there is something you particularly want to see on holiday, but somehow you drift on from day to day and for one reason or another it just doesn’t happen. Sometimes you make a big effort and get there and sometimes you don’t. When we were on holiday a […]

Holiday

Posted on Jul 24, 2010 in holiday | No Comments

I’m taking a little break from blogging. Back in a couple of weeks or so.

More Bodies . . .

. . . in the Bookshop. This annual event at Heffer’s Bookshop in Cambridge was held on 15 July. It’s always good to meet readers (so there IS someone out there after all!), to chat with old crime-writing friends, and make new friends. This year was no exception. On the train on the way home […]

Homicide: Life on the Streets

A few blogs ago I wrote about what we’d be watching now that Wallander and Dr Who have finished. We are pressing on with our American film noir season – enjoyed THIS GUN FOR HIRE based on a Graham Greene novel and starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake – but the other stand-bys are DVDs […]

Family Britain 1951-1957

David Kynaston’s history is a brick of a book, 697 pages long, plus notes and, though fascinating, it is not a quick read. I had it for only a limited time from the London Library so realised that I was going to have to take this seriously and devote all my reading time to it. […]

The Rector’s Daughter

This 1924 novel by F. M. Mayor was chosen by listeners to Radio 4 as a neglected classic in response to an appeal by OPEN BOOK and it is currently being serialized as A Book at Bed-Time. This got me thinking and I got my paperback copy – a Penguin Modern Classic – down from […]

Wallander and film noir

This blog is mostly about reading, and sometimes about writing, but I do watch DVDS and TV as well. I have tended though to watch less and less TV over the years. There is hardly anything I like these days, not even dramatizations of the classics. I prefer to hang on to my own idea […]

Bodies in the Bookshop

More about that in a moment, but first I want to lament the passing of an old friend. Over the years I must have bought dozens of books from Galloway and Porter. They stocked remaindered books and were especially strong – from my point of view – on fiction, art history, cookery and guide books. […]

Paradise

‘I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library’ wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Me, too. A week or two ago I was in the London Library and it occurred to me that this is very nearly my favorite place on earth. Libraries have always been very special places to me. I wrote […]

CADS

CADS stands for a periodical called Crime and Detective Stories, ‘an irregular magazine of comment and criticism about crime and detective stories,’ to use the editor’s own words. It arrives through my letter-box around twice a year and and as I never know when it is going to appear, it always comes as a pleasant […]