Seeing is believing. I’ll not let you or anyone else tell me otherwise. I knew he was a wrong ‘un the moment he came into the shop, which is why I had my beady eye on him in the first…
Blog Archives
Bertha’s Handbag
“You can have the chocolate when we get home, Sam,” said Bertha. “You promised to be good and I promised you the chocolate if you were. But until we get home, I can’t tell if you were good the whole…
Fiction Review: Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
When Elmore Leonard wrote his ten rules of writing, he opened with: Never open a book with weather. Yet eleven years earlier, he had opened one of his better-known novels with: When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years…
Tagged with: crime fiction, Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty, Humour, Satire
Posted in Book review: fiction, Wednesday Pontification
Posted in Book review: fiction, Wednesday Pontification
Walking Home
It’s good to be walking home. Good to feel the crush of snow beneath my feet and the muscular burn of movement beneath a jacket that, I must admit, is a little thin for February. It feels almost as…
The Fence and the Rhino
“So what you got for me?” Friendly face, neutral voice. Eric had found it such a useful way to start a deal that he’d grown a beard to hide his expressions. A lot of the youngsters he dealt with could…
Greater Minds: Anthony Horowitz on writing Sherlock Holmes
Anthony Horowitz was commissioned to write a Sherlock Holmes novel. His afterword described the process of planning a mystery novel. He starts with who murders whom and why, and works outward from there. He developed ten rules to be faithful…
Tagged with: Anthony Horowitz, Arthur Conan Doyle, crime fiction, Mystery, Sherlock Holmes, The House of Silk, Thriller
Posted in Greater minds, Wednesday Pontification
Posted in Greater minds, Wednesday Pontification
Fiction Review: The Score by HJ Golakai
Most people go to lodges in the Little Karoo to get away from it all. Vee Johnson didn’t want to go in the first place, and she definitely didn’t go to explain how a man came to be hanged with…
Tagged with: Cassava Republic Press, crime fiction, HJ Golakai, The Lazarus Effect, The Score, Thriller
Posted in Book review: fiction
Posted in Book review: fiction
Feed the Dog
How was I to know you let your dog go through the rubbish bins? If you fed him properly, he’d stay at home like a happy dog instead of rummaging around in there and getting off his face on my…
Fiction Review: Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
In 1932-1934, Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation caused a famine that killed around six million people. In 1937, Stalin’s statisticians submitted a census of the population of the Soviet Union that fell short of Stalin’s estimates by six million people.…
Tagged with: Child 44, crime fiction, historical fiction, Tom Rob Smith
Posted in Book review: fiction
Posted in Book review: fiction
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