Review – “The Gospel of Eve” by Rachel Mann
All I wanted to do was re-examine Evie’s book. A palimpsest. Was that the solution to the secret of her …
Tag Archives: fiction
Paris Geller and the Chunks of Iron: On the Uses of Unlikeability in Fiction
There’s a kind of character in fiction which my wife refers to as “a Paris”, and I call “a block …
Review: “Murder to Music” by Margaret Newman
Murder to Music was published in 1959, the first novel of a promising detective novelist who apparently then left the …
Guns in the Vicarage: On the Textual Criticism of Detective Fiction
Textual criticism isn’t a discipline often employed in the study of detective fiction, as far as I know. The establishing …
Dangerous Dolphins and Old-fashioned Fish: A Pair of Ngaio Marsh Detective Covers
There have been a lot of Ngaio Marsh novels on my desk recently, and a couple of them give me …
The Subtlety of Governor Gumpas – C.S. Lewis and a Detail of The Discarded Image
I’ve been rereading C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image today, sparked by a reread of Michael Ward’s work on planetary symbolism …
“Three Ordinary, Normal Old Women”: Agatha Christie’s Uses of Shakespeare
Yesterday the journal Shakespeare published an article entitled “Three Ordinary, Normal Old Women: Agatha Christie’s Uses of Shakespeare”. The reason …
A Diversity of Lanyards
This is a bit of a departure for me – a detective story. After all that reading of the classics, …
On Not Judging a (Detective) Book by its (Back) Cover
I’ve written a few pieces on the covers of paperback detective novels recently, because I know how to have a …
(Paperback) Cover Her Face: P.D. James and More Detective Novel Covers
Given that Cover Her Face is a P.D. James novel named after a line from The Duchess of Malfi, and …
quiteirregular 