The Body In The Dumb River by George Bellairs. Dreadful title, great book - study of a lower middle class man trying to escape his wife's terrible family. Gorgeously awful patriarch.
#BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
The Widow Of Bath by Margot Bennett. A smuggling gang, a war-criminal barman, a mysterious judge. Sort of Graham Greene and PG Wodehouse doing a postwar seaside spy thriller.
#britishlibrarycrimeclassics
The Methods Of Sergeant Cluff by Gil North - brilliantly bleak return of the gruff policeman. Worlds away from squires stabbed in studies and all the better for it #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Antidote To Venom - a Freeman Willis Crofts book NOT about railway timetables! Actually fascinating - a zookeeper takes to murder and has a breakdown. Boring İnspector French only shows up in the last chapters
#BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Death In The Tunnel by Miles Burton. Howdunnit. Dispassionate dissection of an impossible crime, almost totally lacking in character just a constant"ooh" of deduction.
#BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
The Christmas Egg by Mary Kelly. Gritty 50s Zone 1 skulduggery. Low-lifes squabble over a dead Russian noble's fortune. Surprising helicopter.
#BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Twice Round The Clock by Billie Houston - country house murder mystery with intriguing slow-acting poison and novel storytelling up until the sub- Edgar Wallace masked hoodlum superspies turn up at the end #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Murder's A Swine by Nap Lombard - married sleuths drink scotch, solve crimes and have wartime japes. Conjures up the phony war brilliantly and is a delight #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Seven Dead by J Jefferson Farjeon - 7 bodies found in a room with a note from The Suicide Club. Brilliant opening fizzles into wrongdoing at a continental boarding house investigated by a yachting journalist #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
The Division Bell Mystery. Couldn't get the acclaim for this #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics. Written by one of the first woman MPs, both female characters are terrible.
Features an introduction by Rachel Reeves
Three paperbacks from the British Library Crime Classics Collection. 'Who Killed Father Christmas and Other Seasonal Mysteries' - edited by Martin Edwards, 'The White Priory Murders' - Carter Dickson, and 'Mystery in White' - J. Jefferson Farjeon
I treated myself to some festive reads for December 😁
📚💙 #BookSky #Books #FestiveReads #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Read BEFORE THE FACT, adapted as Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion.
🥛 : [mwgerard.com/review-before-the-fact]
#BeforeTheFact #GoldenAgeOfCrime #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics #DomesticSuspense #AlfredHitchcock #Suspicion #CaryGrant #JoanFontaine @sourcebooks.bsky.social @poisonedpenpress.bsky.social
So both JB Fletcher AND Oliver Postgate were grandchildren of George Lansbury. Nuts.
Talking of nuts, Verdict of Twelve is a murder mystery solved by the interior monologues of the jurors. İt's a TS Elioty experiment in form. Twelve Angry Wastelands.
#BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Serpents In Eden - really good #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics collection, with a standout twist on a will-leaving-everything-to-charity by PG Wodehouse's step -daughter
The Cornish Coast Murder by John Bude - I owe @jonnymorris.bsky.social a huge apology. Clearly John Bude was writing books before he learned how to write. Awful.
When a squire is found shot in his study WHO CARES?
#BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
The Lost Gallows by John Dickson Carr - insanely gothic! After sightings of a car driven by a dead chauffeur, a hangman's ghost stalks the members of The Brimstone Club. Can they find the missing Ruination Street before midnight?
#britishlibrarycrimeclassics
"Death Knows No Calendar" by John Bude.
Crime-reading retired Major tries to solve the murder of poisonous queen bee.
Well-written, doesn't quite do anything with the idea.
#BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
"Death In White Pyjamas" by John Bude. The 'actors go to a country house, bloodbath ensues' genre.
Beautifully fun writing at the start.
#BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Book cover showing a sunny country garden and cottage
The Secret Of High Eldersham has a misleading cover as it's a dark story of folk magic, witch covens and Satan worship. Heroine owns a speedboat and is called Mavis.
#britishlibrarycrimeclassics
Death Of An Author by ECR Lorac starts off as a BRILLIANT post-modern inquiry - a mysterious author seems to die but a person claiming to be them is still alive.
Becomes less-interesting footle about housekeepers, fake beards and shipwrecks. #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Murder in the Museum by John Rowland. A series of deaths in the British Library explains why #britishlibrarycrimeclassics reprinted this but ooh it's not good.
Promising set-up: a researcher and his shrewish sister uncover murders of academics but it descends to antisemitic mince.
Scarweather by Anthony Rolls. Very heavy-going, vaguely gothic horror rather than murder mystery. People keep on vanishing near an ancient tomb called The Devil's Hump. When the tomb's eventually opened... Surprise!
There is 1 suspect.
#britishlibrarycrimeclassics
Quick Curtain by Alan Melville - delightful Edmund Crispin-waspish mystery about a cursed musical that gets a murderous West End transfer. Torches the genre in the last chapter. #britishlibrarycrimeclassics
A copy of Somebody at the Door by Raymond Postgate, plus a half-knitted hat and a coffee mug are on a train table by the window.
For train trips, the reading has to be a British Library Crime Classics.
#BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
Sgt Cluff Stands Firm - really interesting, gritty psychodrama about a policeman who drives a wife killer insane. #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics
The book The Edinburgh Mystery and other tales of Scottish crime, with a purple and orange cover depicting a big house on a cliff, in front of a pillow with a green teen a small paper with the title
The #TBR tin has spoken: #NextRead
And appropriate too for #MarchMysteryMadness
#CrimeFiction #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics #BookSeriesILove #Books
Murder in Vienna by E.C.R. Lorac #CrimeFiction set in #Vienna #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics @BL_Publishing #TuesdayBookBlog betweenthelinesbookblog.com/2025/02/04/m...
Murder in Vienna by E.C.R. Lorac #CrimeFiction set in #Vienna #BritishLibraryCrimeClassics @BL_Publishing #TuesdayBookBlog betweenthelinesbookblog.com/2025/02/04/m... via @cat-ryan12.bsky.social
