Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our book today is Death in the Ashes, a murder mystery by Albert Bell, the fourth in his delightful “Notebooks of Pliny the Younger” series starring, obviously, the famous first-century author and imperial kiss-up Pliny the Younger, here ably assisted (and mocked the whole time) by the even-more-famous historian Tacitus. Both of them are comparatively [...]
Read MoreLast week’s London Review of Books started out with a dollop of crazy and just kept barreling along! The nutty topping came first, from a letter-writer out of County Tipperary who felt the need to do a little proud confessing: I once sold a pigsty, which is now a disguised dwelling, and built a cabin [...]
Read MoreOur book today is The 12.30 from Croydon, a 1934 thriller (its boring American title was Wilful and Premeditated) by Freeman Wills Crofts, who was both a member in good standing of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction and also that much rarer bird, an Irishman with absolutely no ear for telling a good [...]
Read MoreIt’s not often, especially nowadays, that the cover of The New Yorker is better than any of the contents of the issue, but that certainly happened last week. The issue had an infuriating piece by Tad Friend about a family of irresponsible Nantucket knuckleheads whose ordeal at sea only momentarily distracts the reader from [...]
Read MoreOur book today is 1812, a meaty, fantastic 1996 historical novel by David Nevin, who wrote a string of first-rate books in the fifteen years before his death in 2011. 1812 is the dramatic story of fledgling America’s second fight with the British Empire, and it centers on President James Madison and his strong-willed wife [...]
Read MoreOur book today is The Laughing Policeman, a 1968 police procedural mystery from the phenomenally popular Swedish husband and wife team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo that got translated into English in 1970 and quickly racked up more critical and popular success than all the authors’ previous novels combined and is still considered something [...]
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics claim only the flimsiest of excuses for their existence, and one such recent example would have to be the new reprint of Landscape with Figures, the selected prose writings of the great Victorian author and nature-writer Richard Jefferies, who was born in 1848 and died in 1887 and yet managed to cram [...]
Read MoreOur book today is just about as fine an example of an intelligent, readable popular biography as can be produced in our imperfect world: Christopher Herold’s 1958 National Book Award-winning life of Madame de Stael, Mistress to An Age, which both sold like hotcakes when it first appeared but also satisfied most of the critics; [...]
Read MoreOur book today is that fat tome from 2011, Arguably, a big bright collection of the deadline pieces and miscellaneous hackwork of the late Christopher Hitchens, who actually passed the most feared of authorial meridians and became late in the hanging interval between the book’s appearances in hardcover and its re-issue in paperback (it’s maybe [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Sejanus, a 1998 corker by a writer we’ll be meeting again in this Mystery Monday cavalcade: English mystery author David Wishart, whose whodunits are set in ancient Rome and star leisured, inquisitive, and smart-mouthed Marcus Corvinus and his equally-inquisitive wife Perilla. The books sport titles like Ovid, Nero, and Germanicus, so [...]
Read MoreOrdinarily, the confluence of deadline pressure, space limitations, and professional responsibility tend to level the discourse in the mainstream Penny Press – at least, the regions of it where I forage. It’s true that the front half of explicitly political magazines like The New Statesman or The Weekly Standard will be full of articles claiming [...]
Read MoreOur book today is The Court of St. James’s, a marvelous 1959 confection by that indefatigable hack E. S. Turner, who found rather early on in his life that few pleasures in this world are so reliable and so joyous as the pleasure of making words on the page do exactly what you want them [...]
Read MoreOur book today is a delectable 1969 whodunit called The Stately Home Murder (a distinct improvement on its original title The True Steel) by our old friend Kinn Hamilton McIntosh, better known to mystery aficionados as Catherine Aird. The book has all the beloved trappings of her other fictional outings: it takes place in the [...]
Read MoreOur book today is a huge and marvellous 1977 Penguin concoction called Rebecca West: A Celebration, the cover of which shows a drawing of the author herself, hair in a Doris Lessing-style bun, sensible fake pearls in a string at her neck. “Selected from her writings by her publishers,” we’re told, “with her help.” I’ve [...]
Read MoreOur book today is a pretty thing to look at: Thorburn’s Birds, a 1982 Mermaid Books reprint of the massive 1915 opus by Archibald Thorburn, British Birds. This Mermaid edition is just a selection from that vast work, although a very good one (I’m guessing a copy of the original full-size four-volume set won’t be [...]
Read MoreOur book today is Dorothy Sayers’ steel-riveted 1928 Lord Peter Wimsey mystery The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, which opens with a one-page summary of education, clubs, and coat-of-arms of its gentleman sleuth – which certainly sets the tone. Sayers’ aristocratic amateur finds himself in London’s Bellona Club on Armistice Day when the place is [...]
Read MoreOr is it three Supermen? DC Comics currently publishes three different versions of their flagship character – not three different Superman titles (I think that number is up to eight, yes? If we use the yardstick of ‘title which wouldn’t exist without Superman’ and thus exclude Justice League but include both the idiotically-titled Batman/Superman and [...]
Read MoreOur book today is a sweetly contemplative 1947 nature classic, Speaking of Animals by Alan Devoe, who for many years in the mid-20th century wrote his charming “Down to Earth” column for the old American Mercury and eventually bought a cute little estate in upstate New York called Phudd Hill, where he soon came to [...]
Read MoreThe Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe) Penguin Classics, 2013 Some Penguin Classics break new ground – actually, quite a few of them do, but none announces it more boldly than this translation, by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s [...]
Read MoreRegular magazines must appear, come rain or shine, on their stated schedules – and so it will always fall to some poor sap to have his hard-worked prose appearing before haggard and staggeringly distracted reading public on December 30th or 31st, or some such ungodly date. And surely only deepening the depression of such writers [...]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.