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Continue reading →: Merrily to the Grave by Katherine Sully
Seventy years ago it is easy to understand how dark and disturbing literature fell quickly out of favour, and off the bookshelves never to return, if it wasn’t for hardworking folk like those at the Neglected Books website. Katherine Sully was such an author, and this, a very good example…
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Continue reading →: Belle by Georges Simenon
translated from the French by Louise Varèse This is the first of three romans durs novels set in Connecticut, where Simenon settled after divorcing his first wife and marrying Denyse.Rather than the sense of place being important, it is the time at which it is set, the late 1940s, early…
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Continue reading →: The Heights of RangsundøyaThere are three houses at the bay where I am parked, only one of them is lived in all year round. The other two are holiday homes. The guy came over and said hello not long after I arrived. I asked if it was okay to stay, and he had…
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Continue reading →: Antibodies
Germany 2005 This is far superior to the regular police versus serial killer drama, it is original and daring, moving into horror territory at times. The police have eventually captured serial killer Gabriel Engel. A small town policeman, Michael Martens, comes to interrogate him to see if a missing young…
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Continue reading →: Goldfish by Raymond Chandler
First published in Black Mask magazine in 1933 Marlowe receives a visit from his friend, Kathy Horne, who runs the cigar concession at the Mansion House Hotel across the street from his office. Kathy tells Marlowe about the Leander pearl heist. Two valuable pearls worth a quarter of a million…
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Continue reading →: Island of Rangsundøya – now with midnight sunYesterday was a three ferry day, the first being to return from Onøya and Lurøya to the mainland, a forty minute journey that returned us to Stokkvagen where we had left on Monday. From there it was a twenty kilometre drive through spectacular mountain scenery to Kilboghavn where there is…
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Continue reading →: Swastika Night by Murray Constantine
First published in 1937, under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine, this is set some 700 years in the future. Katherine Burdekin wrote feminist dystopian fiction in the 1920s both under her own name and as Constantine. She also wrote some children’s fiction, though this certainly isn’t that. The novel describes…
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Continue reading →: We have reached the hills. The mountains lie beyond.The title is something I found while reading recently, and was actually a school classroom motto from rural Wisconsin in the year 1900. I think it’s tremendous. It’s applicable for me also, not because as I go further north the mountains will get higher, but because the journey will become…
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Continue reading →: The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham
This debut novel from Canadian / Korean author Ham, is strong on visual imagery. Narrated by University student Yewon, the opening paragraphs concern her mother washing their ancestors’ bones in the family bathtub. These images, which Ham describes periodically, along with certain motifs of gothic and horror fiction, give the…
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Continue reading →: Swag by Elmore Leonard
Leonard’s writing is all about the dialogue and this is a good example of him at his best. An unlikely couple team up as business partners, car salesman Frank Ryan and Ernest Stickley, Junior, (‘Stick’), an unemployed cement-truck driver who had the temerity to rip him off right on his…
To live more widely
supera superiora sequi
SafeReturnDoubtful is my alias.
Where is Andy?
I was so much older then…
Quote of the Week
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, ‘What road do I take?’ The cat asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it really doesn’t matter, does it?’
Lewis Carroll
Safe Return Doubtful 