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Happy Mew Year...Ow!
This year on the first Saturday of each month I'll be sharing with you the assortment of bloodthirsty felines who grace the 2014 calendar called Vampire Kitties. I got this for Joe as a gag Christmas...
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Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge 2014
Who doesn't like a challenge? Each year Bev at My Reader's Block asks readers to travel back in time and read the kind of books that this blog celebrates nearly every day - the vintage mystery. Last...
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What a Friend I Have in Sarah
While I was celebrating my anti-holiday last month Pretty Sinister Books was being recommended by Sarah Weinman at both her blog devoted to Domestic Suspense and her Tumblr page.DomesticSuspense.com...
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FFB: The Man in the Moonlight - Helen McCloy
Helen McCloy would have made a great writer of TV crime show scripts these days. While reading The Man in the Moonlight (1940), her sophomore detective novel featuring Dr. Basil Willing, I was struck...
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Drawing on the Past #12 : GEORGE H & WILLIAM L THOMAS
Work: Armadale by Wilkie Collins(Harper & Brothers, 1866)1st US edition Artists: George H Thomas (drawings)and William Thomas (engraving) As a teaser for an upcoming review here are the...
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FFB: Armadale - Wilkie Collins
"I am in one of my tempers tonight. I want a husband to vex, or a child to beat, or something of that sort. Do you ever like to see the summer insects kill themselves in the candle? I do sometimes."--...
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Able and Willing - Raven's Head Press News
Raven's Head Press has some wonderful news for vintage detective fiction fans. Take a look at the email I received yesterday afternoon.This is a huge coup for our little operation. We plan to reprint...
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One Drop of Blood - Anne Austin
There's trouble at Mayfield Sanitarium now that Dr. Carl Koenig, their kindly director is dead. Someone has bludgeoned him with a miniature replica of the famous Discus thrower statue. His office is in...
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The Wedding Guest Sat on a Stone - Richard Shattuck
The New York Times reviewer for The Wedding Guest Sat on a Stone (1940) called it "...hilariously funny...a real mystery". Marcia Muller wrote a praiseworthy essay for 1001 Midnights calling the same...
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FFB: The Careless Hangman - Nigel Morland
Dubbed "the toughest woman in Christendom" by reporter Dick Lodden Palmyra Pym is the original badass police woman.She began her professional life in journalism, then joined the Royal Navy during World...
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Drawing on the Past #13: G.K. CHESTERTON
Lilly Library (photo by "Vmenkov")While researching Victor L. Whitechurch, whose books I am currently reading, I came across a fascinating post at the website for Indiana University's Lilly Library...
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FFB: Thrilling Stories of the Railway - Victor L Whitechurch
1st UK edition (Pearson, 1912)For decades Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912) has been one of the Crown Jewels for collectors of vintage detective fiction. The original first edition has been one...
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FOUND BOUND: The Gory Gazette
Periodically I find myself stuck in the pages of magazines (there's a punny sentence for you!). Usually I'm perusing old reviews of forgotten and obscure murder mysteries and adventure novels. Every...
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The Ghost Knows His Greengages - R. B. Saxe
Great sufferin’ antimacassars!Sammy Creed here. Me and the Ghost (or John Dobbs as his parents supposedly named him though by all the signs and portents I do believe he made it up) get mixed up in some...
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FFB: Just an Ordinary Day - Shirley Jackson
The introduction to Just an Ordinary Day (1997) written by two of Shirley Jackson's grown children tells how they received a box of manuscripts, carbon copies and typewritten sheets of unpublished...
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The Robbery at Rudwick House - Victor L Whitechurch
The Robbery at Rudwick House (1929) is the third of only five crime novels written by Victor L. Whitechurch, cleric turned mystery writer and one of the first members of The Detection Club....
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Hothouse Melodrama!
Check out that pistol packin' mama! If Fritzi Haller ever carried a weapon she couldn't look any more threatening. That gorgeous illustration is the cover painting for the latest reprint from Raven's...
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FFB: My Late Wives - Carter Dickson
"If there's any flumdiddling of the police to be done, I'm the one to do it."--Sir Henry Merrivale in My Late WivesThere is a lot of flumdiddling and farcical doings amid the criminal mischief and...
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NEGLECTED DETECTIVES: Phineas Spinnet
Phineas Spinnet is the creation of Andrew Soutar, an incredibly prolific British writer during the 1920s and 1930s whose popular fiction mostly consists of romances and domestic melodramas. Soutar also...
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STAGE BLOOD: Corpus Delicti Opening Soon
This is my 500th post on Pretty Sinister Books and it's not about a book. It's about Corpus Delicti, an original play receiving it's premiere by Madkap Productions here in Chicago. And why did I choose...
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