A Few Thoughts about McCloy, Carr (yet again) and Literary Influeces

When reading Alias Basil Willing last year I was surprised to find that Helen McCloy had inscribed her book to John Dickson Carr and his wife Clarice as nothing I knew about their respective works suggested they might have known, let alone appreciated, each other. Now one year later and upon finishing McCloy's The Deadly …

Telling Stories

It is interesting, though not entirely surprising, that the same people who spent years and years deriding, ridiculing and overall dismissing the HIBK school as "feminine" fluff never tried to account for its success other than by more or less subtly impugning the intelligence of its readers. Surely those ladies - for they were all …

La Parenthèse enchantée

Les années d'après-guerre ne sont pas une période que l'on associe généralement avec de grandes avancées pour les droits des femmes, bien au contraire. La décennie qui suit la fin des hostilités est même souvent considérée, aux Etats-Unis surtout, comme un repoussoir absolu en termes d'égalité et d'inclusion, au point que tout politicien jugé un …

Confessions d’un renégat involontaire

On me demande parfois pourquoi j'écris principalement en anglais. Tu es français alors écris en français que diable! Comment espères-tu toucher un public dont tu refuses de parler la langue?   Aussi étonnant que cela puisse paraître, je préfère de loin m'exprimer dans ma langue natale. Je n'ai pas à consulter un dictionnaire en ligne …

En ordre de Marsh

Des quatre « Reines » du roman à énigme britannique consacrées par la critique anglophone, Ngaio Marsh est sans doute celle qui a le moins souffert chez nous de l’ombre portée d’Agatha Christie. Si elle fut relativement peu traduite de son vivant, son oeuvre connut un étonnant retour en grâce dans les années 80 et 90, grâce …

(Dis)SiMillarities

I discovered Margaret Millar first, with one of her masterpieces, How Like an Angel. Julian Symons bears some responsability for it as his rhapsodising about her and this book in particular in Bloody Murder had made me curious and led to buy the book when I found it in a Montpellier bookstore. I didn't and …

Wanted: Game-Changer

I was reading a FB post yesterday about Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest as it was first published on that very date in 1929 and it made me wonder - and still does, which explains the rambling nature of this post for which I apologize in advance. The main question was: Is such a game-changer of …

A Matter of Mood

Cosy and Noir are usually seen as the two extremes bookending the large spectrum of crime fiction. That claim is not without merit (they are indeed extremes) but also rests on the mistaken  premise that Cosy and Noir are separate, distinct genres - which they are not. This may seem a rather counter-intuitive take as …

The Ten, 2021 Edition

So 2021 is over, or will be in a few hours, and it is thus time for me to tell you about my favourite books of the year, something you've undoubtedly been feverishly waiting for all those twelve months. Who will succeed Lawrence G. Blochman? Will it be a major or reasonably well known writer …

Justice for the Victorians

Some people, myself included, have used the word "Victorian" to describe our current brand of long-winded, bloated narratives, especially as pertains to books and this is actually a slander - against Victorian fiction, that is.   There's no denying the Victorians were not models of brevity when it came to novel writing; what's more, they …