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A Scream In Soho

A review of A Scream in Soho by John Brandon – 260525 John Brandon was a heavyweight boxer who went on to write some 120 plus novels, including this which was originally published in 1940 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series. Set in a Soho enveloped in the darkness of the blackout during the phoney beginning of the Second World War, it is an action-packed thriller,…

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Peter Newell – The Man Who Put Fun In Children’s Books

The American artist, Peter Newell, was notable for his illustrations which featured in editions of works by such authors as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Lewis Carroll. He also created a comic strip serial for the New York Herald in 1905 entitled The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead. However, he was also famous in his own right for a series of novelty children’s book which not only showed great…

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A Refuge For Rejection

For those of us engaged in the precarious business of writing, rejection is a painful fact of life. The consolation is that even the greatest writers at the outset of their glittering literary careers received that little slip that accompanied their returned manuscript. There was and still is the option of self-publishing for those determined to ensure that their pet project saw the light of day.…

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The Unfinished Clue

A review of The Unfinished Clue by Georgette Heyer – 260523 Georgette Heyer’s third country house mystery, first published in 1933 and serialized in British newspapers the following year as One Woman Who Knew, takes us to very familiar territory, a gathering at the Grange, the country pile of General Sir Arthur Billington-Smith. He might as well have a sign hanging around his neck saying “murder…

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Yorkshire Relish

In an age when food was at best bland and at worst of dubious quality, what better way to liven it up than with a dollop of Yorkshire Relish, which was shamelessly advertised as “the most delicious sauce in the world”? No probably in those days, although it was the highest selling sauce of its time. Like Worcestershire Sauce, Yorkshire Relish was the brainchild of a chemist, in this instance…

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Bodies From The Library - Volume Two

A review of Bodies From The Library – Volume Two, edited by Tony Medawar – 260521 Following on from Volume One, Tony Medawar has presented another fifteen stories, a couple in the form of scripts for plays, which have either been published just once in either a newspaper, a magazine or a collection or have never been published before. As usual the collection is a mix of famous names from Ethel…

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Typesetting Races Open The Door For Women

George Arensberg’s speed and dexterity in typesetting set a record that stood for sixteen years, but his achievements marked the acme of the cosy male dominated world of the compositors. Two threats were fast emerging, the first of which was the entry of females into the trade. After the American Civil War around 10% of the workforce in print shops were women, although the strong union presence…

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The 5:18 Mystery

A review of The 5:18 Mystery by J Jefferson Farjeon – 260520 A relaxing train journey from Liverpool Street to Cromer in Norfolk in a first-class carriage should be the perfect start to a holiday for young Freddy Reeve, who had donned for the first time in his life a suit from Savile Row and who was on the look out for adventure. A train journey in the hands of a crime writer, though, is an open…

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Red Faces Of The Week (14)

After years outside, being baked by the sun and lashed by the wind and rain, the Calvário statues, depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ, in Carmo do Cajuru in the southeastern region of Brazil needed a bit of a touch up. And so the local parish commissioned an unnamed individual to do the work. The result was so awful it was a piece of art in itself. The religious figures were given…

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The Father Of Children’s Literature

Children’s literature began to change in the 18th century, moving away from religious tracts and moral didacticism to books that were intended to amuse and entertain children as well as inform them. Leading the charge was London printer, Thomas Boreman, whose A Description of Three Hundred Animals (1730) contained a delightful mix of fact and fantasy and remained in print for a hundred…

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The Urgent Hangman

A review of The Urgent Hangman by Peter Cheyney – 260519 Originally published in 1938 and reissued by Dean Street Press, Peter Cheyney’s The Urgent Hangman takes its title from a couplet that ran “see how she twists and turns in parlous straits: finger your neck, my sweet, the urgent hangman waits!” The title is apt as the story, written very much in the style of a Raymond Chandler novel, tells…

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Papa Salt Coastal Gin

It is perhaps a sign of the times, but I have become a little more staid in my taste in gin, preferring to stick to my range of tried and tested favourites rather than taking a punt on something that might or might not float my boat. It takes something rather special then to grab my attention. Readers of this blog will know that I am a sucker for a beautifully designed bottle and when it is…

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Final Acts

A review of Final Acts, Theatrical Mysteries, compiled by Martin Edwards – 260508 Another fascinating compilation of short stories, this time fourteen mysteries, compiled by Martin Edwards for the British Library Crime Classics series, taking as its organizing conceit theatrical settings. Some highly regarded crime novelists have had a deep association with the theatre, Ngaio Marsh, for…

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Typesetting Races

On July 3, 1886, Whitelaw Reid organized the first public demonstration of a mechanical typesetting machine, the Linotype, a machine that would revolutionise the world of printing. Hitherto, compositors had set texts by hand, combining accuracy with speed. The unit by which the speed of a compositor was measured with an em, a term which originated from the traditional width of the capital letter…

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Maigret And The Lazy Burglar

A review of Maigret and the Lazy Burglar by Georges Simenon – 260506 The fifty-seventh book in Simenon’s Maigret series, originally published in 1961, Maigret and the Lazy Burglar, also known as Maigret and the Idle Burglar, sees the detective two years away from a well-earned retirement and in despair at the changes in the French judicial system which have effectively put the active police…

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The Producers

Are you the sort of person who studies the credits at the end of a film? I know lots of people have beavered away to make the film, but do I really want to know who they are. Instead, as soon as the action has finished I switch channel or head for the exit of the cinema. Fortunately, Stephen Follows is made of sterner stuff and has detected an interesting trend in the number of producers engaged…

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Huffy Radiobike

How did you become the coolest kid on the block in 1955? By owning a Huffy Radiobike, of course. Complete with a light but rugged frame designed to provide a lower centre of gravity, gears, foot-powered brakes, it had all the features of the latest bicycles of the time. Its pièce de resistance, though, was that it came with its own radio so that you could listen to your rock and roll favourites…

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