“Holmes’s stories […] have a surprisingly grounded view of crime, & one that arguably fits better into the hardboiled tradition of Hammett & Chandler than the cozy tradition of Christie.”
Doyle didn’t just write #CrimeFiction … Alan Brown looks at Arthur Conan Doyle’s “vain, volatile, & brilliant” Scottish adventurer-scientist-explorer & dinosaur hunter Professor George Edward Challenger
In 1912, “Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the world’s most celebrated fictional detective, had turned detective himself in an actual murder case – in the process liberating a man who had spent nearly twenty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”
In March 1927, Arthur Conan Doyle put together a list of his own top 12 Sherlock Holmes stories, sealed it in an envelope, & left it with the editor of the Strand magazine…
A well balanced combination of extremely good characters, a very solid and intriguing plot, great atmosphere and some well placed social commentary into the bargain, THE QUARRY tackles quite a bit and achieves all of it with considerable flair.
I wonder if property prices dropped in Brighton & Hove dropped after Peter James started writing his Roy Grace novels. It seems everyone is a serial killer, victim or career criminal who lives there. #books#reading#crimefiction
The #TBR tin has spoken.
Next read for fiction:
Great tales of detection has 19 short stories selected and introduced by Dorothy L. Sayers. This collection was originally published in 1936, but it's still easy to find this more "recent" edition from Everyman.
Sayers edited several short stories collections and besides the interesting stories, she also wrote insightful introductions about the history and development of the genre.
I'll be using an Oxford related bookmark.
Next read for non-fiction:
Howdunit is a collection of essays about the genre and the work of detective, crime, thrillers authors. The articles are all from the past and present members of The Detection Club, organised and edited by Martin Edwards.
Bookmark from the Portuguese edition of The Floating Admiral, also a The Detection Club work.
1911, on a winter's night in arid New South Wales wool country, mounted trooper Augustus Hawkins discovers the bodies of three young people. They are scions of the richest family in the district...
... first novel featuring DI Nyree Bradshaw (BETTER LEFT DEAD is now available), set in the upper north island region of New Zealand, with idyllic scenery, pockets of poverty, a strong, tight knit Māori community, and a lot of fractious relationships.
... first novel featuring DI Nyree Bradshaw (BETTER LEFT DEAD is now available), set in the upper north island region of New Zealand, with idyllic scenery, pockets of poverty, a strong, tight knit Māori community, and a lot of fractious relationships.
Another not much happened update from last week on AustCrime. In my defence, a lot of books are being read, which isn't leaving a lot of time for much else.
I'm halfway through "Agatha Christie's Poirot" by Mark Aldridge and it's being a delight (swipe for the cover). My preference goes to the context, discussing, and analysis Aldridge does for each work and adaptation, but the book is full of "extras" that add up to the arguments, like unpublished excerpts from Christie's autobiography, interviews, letters, reader reports, reactions at the time to the book's publication, visual and radio adaptations, some of which did not survive, but others that are still available, showing the rigorous and huge amount of work and research Aldridge must have put into this book.
The text is accompanied by book covers from editions through time and different countries. Some of these, depicting Poirot. As a reader that sometimes feels the adaptation doesn't portray the characters quiet as I imagined them, I do understand the resistance Christie had with depictions of Poirot. Still, I find it interesting to see how he was portrayed.
So, I thought I would share some of Portuguese book covers that depict Poirot. These are from the Portuguese collection, #ColecçãoVampiro, that was quite important for the dissemination of the genre in Portugal. The collection has more than 700 volumes and it was published between 1947 and 2008.
The books from the image (by order of the publication in this collection):
The Labours of Hercules (same in PT)
Dead Man's Folly (translated as Poirot and the Macabre Game)
The Clocks (translated as Poirot and the 4 Clocks)
Curtain Poirot's Last Case (The Curtain Drops The Last Case of Poirot)
One, Two, Buckle my Shoe/ The Patriotic Murders (same in PT)
Problem at Pollensa Bay and other stories (translated as Poirot and Company and with an introduction, a list of titles in the collection, a list of original titles, and a list of characters with notes by Joel Lima)
The #TBR tin has spoken.
I've been dipping in and out of "Poirot, The Greatest Detective in the World" by Mark Aldridge since it came out, but I wanted to read it "properly" :-)
I started it yesterday's night thinking I would read just a little bit, but I'm must confess this is one most difficult to put it down 😍
Husband and I took Suchet DVDs out and are watching them in order, I'm also re-reading some of the books because of that, so the time for "Poirot" couldn't be better.
Can I just add how beautiful I think this cover is?
Book review #16 for 2024 Colin Dexter's Service of All the Dead. Another Dexter novel of twists and turns that are made straight in the concluding chapters of the book. I still cannot listen to this series without hearing the voices of the late John Thaw CBE and Kevin Whatley as Morse and Lewis. Well narrated.
☕☕☕☕ review #morse#crimefiction#books@bookstodon@books