Steve Donoghue’s posts from the original Open Letters Monthly Archives.
Our 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 MoreThree of Ian Rankin's most popular recurring characters come together in his irresistible latest novel
Read MoreThe sprawling, disjointed history of the Habsburg Empire forms the backdrop for Simon Winder's latest combination of history lesson and personal essay.
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 MoreA hefty new anthology collects hundreds of years worth of poetry about the wars, pestilences, triumphs, and plagues poets endured and tried to capture in verse
Read MoreSixteen years ago, young mercenary Eddie LaCrosse saved a baby girl from an angry bear and found her a good home far from trouble - or so he thought. Sixteen years later, that baby girl is all grown up and at the heart of all the trouble in the world in Alex Bledsoe's latest nifty sword-and-sorcery novel
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 MoreFrom the best-selling author of "Loving Frank" comes the story of Fanny Osbourne, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson
Read MoreAs if our intrepid American-born doctor Thomas Silkstone didn't have enough problems on his hand, a great monstrous FOG is engulfing the English countryside!
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 MoreThe philosopher who wrote "A Treatise on Human Nature" was famous in his own lifetime for an immense work of quite a different nature; a new book looks again at "The History of England"
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 MoreWhat explains the similarities of animal forms scattered across the wide expanses of the world? A terrific new book makes the case that life persistently wanders.
Read MoreA cocky young Wall Street analyst makes a discovery that could point to a new and deadly kind of war
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 MoreAn extremely generous collection of letters by the great 20th century tastemaker in books, Malcolm Cowley
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 MoreThe indomitable 17th century midwife Bridget Hodgson returns in another thrilling murder mystery
Read MoreOur book today is The Best Mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart, one of those neat, attractive hardcovers Reader’s Digest used to produce in such great quantities. This one’s from 2002 and contains four of Mary Robert Rinehart’s most popular novels, The Circular Staircase, The Man in Lower Ten, The Window at the White Cat, and [...]
Read MoreThis is a place for all of my writing about books.