Monday, April 23, 2012

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.

kallen_tanglewood

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.

keating_deathofamaharajah keating_inspector_ghote1

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.

marsh_colourscheme marsh_gravemistake

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

mysterycats

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.

peters_morbidtaste

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.

potter_trailofblood

More crime fiction will follow shortly.

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