Crime Fiction 7

Moving on with crime fiction, the first book in this post is The Tanglewood Murder by Lucille Kallen, another Hamlyn Whodunnit publication. Lucille Kallen sounds like she was quite an interesting lady - the only woman in the celebrated gang of brilliant, zany comedy writers behind Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows." Check out the link above to read more about her.

H R F Keating’s Inspector Ghote novels I have mentioned previously in the Penguin Crime posts. Here are two more, published by Hamlyn in their Whodunnit series.

Ngaio Marsh is a name you don’t hear much about these days, but she was a very popular writer in the 1950s and ‘60s.  I haven’t read her books for decades, but a few of her novels are still floating around on my bookshelves.

Mystery Cats is an oddity, a collection of short stories featuring cats in crime fiction. It has a rather snazzy cover.

Back to standard crime detection, or perhaps not…

Edith Pargeter writing as Ellis Peters set a series of detective novels in 12th Century England featuring the unconventional Brother Cadfael as the medieval shamus. Pargeter was a prolific writer and wrote twenty Cadfael novels in all . I appear to only have the first of them in my library – A Morbid Taste For Bones first published in 1977.

And finally for this post, A Trail of Blood by Jeremy Potter, another historical mystery novel dealing with the fate of the princes in the tower. It’s a rather good novel - I certainly enjoyed rereading it fairly recently. Potter was a member of the Richard III Society, so certainly knew the history of the period.

More crime fiction will follow shortly.

Crime – Penguin Crime 3

I have been remiss again. So much for retirement from the work force, I seem to be busier than ever with trivial distractions.

But to continue with Penguin Crime, here is the next instalment…

P. D James is well known in the field of detective fiction, particularly for her Adam Dalgliesh detective series of which I have quite a few, all published by Penguin.

Firstly two omnibus editions, the first obviously featuring Adam Dalgliesh. Trilogy of Death comprises two Cordelia Grey mysteries and  general crime novel, Innocent Blood.

The following are more Adam Dalgliesh novels. P D James also wrote a quite interesting dystopian novel The Children of Men, which I will display later.

The detective novels of H.R.F. Keating are set in India, his detective character being Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID. It is remarkable how many detective novels are set in unusual locations and periods. I suppose it adds a certain exoticism to the storyline. These Penguin editions date from the mid 1970s.

Also set in the exotic location of Berlin during the Nazi ascendancy , Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels are of the hard boiled Raymond Chandler type. The first three of the Bernie Gunther series are available in the omnibus edition Berlin Noir which comprises the three novels March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem. A friend loaned me the collected edition, and I desultorily tried to collect the individual volumes, hence the sole copy of A German Requiem in my library.

Back to more conventional crime locales with the novels of Hilda Lawrence. There’s not much about her on the web, but I recall not minding these novels at all.

Next Mad Hatters Holiday by Peter Lovesey. This appears to be the only one of his books I have. It’s an old Penguin edition published 1981.

Margaret Millar is an American Canadian crime writer, who is married to fellow crime novelist Ross MacDonald. It is years since I last read the two novels below, so can’t really remember what they were like, but they sound quite interesting from the blurbs on the back.

And finally for this post, Edwin of the Iron Shoes by Marcia Muller, which was her first novel featuring female sleuth Sharon McCone and was published by Penguin in 1978.

There are only about a dozen or so Penguin crime novels left to display. I’ll try and get them out of the way soon, then tackle the rest of my crime and mystery collection.