Our book today is the unsinkable 1950 Patricia Highsmith masterpiece Strangers on A Train, which wastes no time in leaping straight to the area of crime-fiction that always fascinated her: motive. Mystery novels love to play with all three of the tenets of crime – motive, means, and opportunity – but every author finds his [...]

Our book today is Memoirs of an Editor, a big, bustling 1924 volume by Edward Mitchell, who was for a long time the editor-in-chief of the old New York Sun, a position he took over from his semi-legendary predecessor, Charles A. Dana, a brilliant and recondite figure who was always the smartest person in any [...]

Our book today is 1994′s Pictures of Perfection, one of the incredibly entertaining Dalziel & Pascoe mystery novels of the late, great Reginald Hill, although really I could be just as happy picking any of these delightful novels to re-read and praise here. Hill wrote mountains of prose (the full catalog may never be assembled, [...]

Our book today is the lusty 1970 historical novel The Kings Of Vain Intent by Graham Shelby, a mid-20th century hack book reviewer who struck historical novel gold with his book The Knights of Dark Renown, the prequel to this present book. Shelby is a largely artless writer, but he knows full well the visceral [...]

Our book today is Thomas Harris’s ultra-famous 1981 novel Red Dragon, the perfect shard of falling crystal that triggered an avalanche of such proportions that most novelists don’t even dare to dream that anything like it will happen to them. The book was a moderate seller for Bantam in its modest original printing despite near-universal [...]

I vaguely understand the value of the celebrity endorsement, the eye-catching strategy of linking stars to products, but I swear, if I live to be thirty I’ll never understand the pursuit of that strategy in open contradiction of its own meaning. Yes, of course if you’re a health magazine, you’d want to find some nice [...]