I FOUND IT ON A CHARITY BOOKSTALL ... and in an op shop, book fair, garage sale, junk yard. All the places where people leave their unwanted books--and I find weird and wonderful treasures. Come and join me in appreciating these literary marvels!
'There's something evil about it, he said. 'Queer word for me to use, MacLeod, eh? They touch your elbow as you walk—ghosts! That's how I've named it the Valley of the Ghosts. Go and stay a day or so in Beverley Green and smell it for yourself—something brooding...'
DR ANDREW MACLEOD, pathologist and detective extraordinare, was never one to refuse a challange...
... And the back cover contains a solid block of text, ticking of all the main plot points and characters one by one. Really, why buy the book when you can get a complete summary of the story on the back cover?FIVE LITTLE PIGS starts with Carla Lemarchant calling on the famous detective Hercule Poirot. She tells him she is really the daughter of the painter Amyas Crale for whose murder, sixteen years ago, her mother Caroline was sentenced to death. Carla, convinced of her mother's innocence and eager to clear her name, persuades Poirot to investigate the case. It appears that there are five people who are concerned (hence the book's title) from the nursery-rhyme about the five little pigs). They are: Philip Blake, Crales's greatest friend; Philip's elder brother, Meredith; Elsa Greer, "the girl in the case", who is now Lady Dittisham; Cecilia Williams, the governess; and Angela Warren, Caroline's half-sister. Poirot interviews each of the five. Then each provides for him a written narrative of the events leading up to Crale's murder. Finally, Poirot reconstructs the crime and reaches his startling conclusion. Whether you will guess the solution before it is revealed will depend on your ability to avoid being deceived by the 'double twist' at the story's climax.
THE SECRET OF CHIMNEYS. This is Agatha Christie at her mysterious best. Anthony Cade, who liked an exciting life, was in Bulawayo escorting a group of tiresome tourists for Castle's Select Tours when Jimmy McGrath, an old friend, turned up with an attractive offer: £250 if he would carry to a London publisher the memoirs of Count Stylpitch, late Prime Minister of Herzoslovakia. Anthony jumps at it, and also agrees to find a lady named Virginia Revel and return to her some letters misguidedly bequeathed to McGrath as possible blackmail material. He hasn't been in London long before the letters are stolen from him, and Virginia, a beautiful widow, finds a dead man in her study—shot with a revolver engraved with her name. Then a Hersoslovakian envoy is shot at 'Chimneys', one of England's stately homes. From there on, this light-hearted thriller moves at a terrific pace. There are detectives French, British and American ; characters gay, scatter-brained, sinister and odious. And there are murders, clues, secret passages, a fabulous jewel, a mysterious rose emblem, a curious organization called the Comrades of the Red Hand, an international jewel-thief called King Victor, and impersonations, assassinations and machinations. At the end of it all Anthony, who has done most of the work and kept everyone (including the reader) guessing, claims a double reward ; a lovely lady and a very, very strange new job.
MR HERCULE POIROTYOU FANCY YOURSELF, DON'T YOU, AT SOLVING MYSTERIES THAT ARE TOO DIFFICULT FOR OUR POOR THICKHEADED BRITISH POLICE? LET US SEE, MR. CLEVER POIROT, JUST HOW CLEVER YOU CAN BE. PERHAPS YOU'LL FIND THIS NUT TOO HARD TO CRACK. LOOK OUT FOR ANDOVER ON THE 21ST OF THE MONTHYOURS, ETC.,A B C
This letter disturbs the famous detective. Sure enough, a Mrs. Archer is murdered at Andover on the 21st.
A second lettter announces a murder at Bexhill: and Betty Barnard is found strangled.
Then a third, at Churston, the victim being Sir Carmichael Clarke... a fourth, at Doncaster on the day of the great St. Leger race.
Beside the corpse each time lies an ABC railway guide open at the name of the place where the crime occurs.
A B C D... How far through the alphabet will the crazy murderer get? Will his challenge to Poirot succeed?
Here is Agatha Christie in a different mood.Her first story, THE HOUND OF DEATH, is fair warning that she intends to make you shiver and think!Each of the twelve stories underlines the remarkable versatility of this very remarkable writer. Some, like THE RED SIGNAL and THE FOURTH MAN, may make you shift uneasily in your chair. Others, like the ironic WIRELESS, will give you grim satisfaction.
Tucked away in the middle, like a bonus, is a story which is clearly the origin of her world-wide stage and screen success, WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION.
John Creasey gave his detective hero the nickname "Handsome", but in book after book also has him brawling and/or getting beaten up. Maybe by this stage in the series he should be called "Cauliflower Ear" or "Broken Nose" West instead!"Handsome" West of the Yard is enjoying a well-earned holiday at the seaside with his wife and young family when news breaks of the murder of an M.P. In spite of Janet's protests, Roger hurries back to London "to take a look around", and contrives to be given official charge of the case.Even a preliminary inquiry into Riddel's death opens up a vast number of complications to West. The pursuit of a small package, for example, leads him into many dangers and strange places. Slowly a pattern begins to emerge . . .
ASPIRIN ORARSENIC?Stake...Half a million dollarsMethod...Four pills in a phialResult...One dead wifeProof...The tell-tale effect of ultra-violet light!The toughest, most complicated web of intrigue that PERRY MASON ever had to fight his way through!
First published early in Agatha Christie's career in 1924, this book was written while she was still experimenting with different genres. It is a thriller rather than a classic whodunnit--and her heroine is an enterprising amateur caught in the middle of things rather than a professional detective. Readers of Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series will find this a rather different kind of read!THE mysterious man in the brown suit is a link between a fatal accident at a London Underground station and the body of a strangled woman found at a Member of Parliament's lonely country house.
Enterprising Anne Beddingfeld, back by a newspaper magnate, follows clues leading to South Africa, and there finds herself plunged into a highly dangerous Secret Service adventure.
about this book
The twentieth ' Miss Silver ' mystery.
Anna sounds a dull, uninteresting girl, but when she stops writing after three years of intensive post-school correspondence, Thomasina becomes anxious about her old school-friend. In her last letter Anna spoke of a new job without giving any details, and then, to quote Thomasina, she disappears. The case is put before Miss Silver... "Just a girl who has stopped writing."
And without a doubt, the solution is brilliant ingenious. (No, I'm not going to tell you what it is. This blog is a Spoiler Free Zone! If you haven't already read Murder on the Orient Express--one of Christie's best known books--do so and find out the solution for yourself.)Thundering along on its three days' journey across Europe, the famous Orient Express suddenly comes to a stop in the night.Snowdrifts block the line somewhere in the Balkans. Everything is quiet and passengers quickly settle down for the night, including Hercule Poirot.In the morning an American millionaire is found stabbed, many times--Poirot is very much wanted. The untrodden snow seems to prove that the murderer is still on board. Poirot begins to think--and a brilliantly ingenious solution is found...
And here is the Great Detective's introduction to the world:HERCULE POIROT...today the most popular detective in fiction since Sherlock Holmes, made his bow to the world in this book.No one had heard the name AGATHA CHRISTIE when she shyly sent the MS. to a London publisher. He rejected it! So did others. Then one more far-seeing accepted the new author's work. It became famous--and Christie fans place it among the very best Poirot tales.Intriguing clues marked the murder at Styles Court--crushed fragments of a coffee cup, few few threads of fabric, a scrap of half charred paper, an old envelope with these words on it:posessedI am posessedHe is possessedI am possessedpossessed
If Agatha Christie had know she would be writing about this character for over fifty years, I suspect she wouldn't have made his quite so eccentric, nor would she have made him already elderly on his first outing in print!Poirot was an extraordinary-looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but he carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police.
[Chapter II]
Hostess as in "nightclub hostess", that is.Frame-up!She looked cool and innocent on the witness stand--a formidable challenge for Perry Mason.She held the jury spellbound--for she had all the trumps to convict an innocent man.And when Perry sprang his bomb-shell, the hoped-for explosion never came...That was 5 p.m. Friday, leaving Mason three nights, two days, to break the case against his client... Tense, action-packed hours, with the chips mounting steadily against him.
Flaubert's infamous adulteress is sexed-up, 1950s style, on the cover of this paperback. Maybe it's her anachronistic makeup, or her backless nightwear (and seriously, how is she keeping that garment from falling off?) but this picture does not say "nineteenth century novel" to me. It doesn't even say "notorious nineteenth century novel" to me. I could imagine an ignorant reader mistaking this one for contemporary sleaze, and finding himself with something quite different!In 1857 when Madame Bovary was first published, the detailed realism of its love scenes shocked and horrified the entire populace of France; and Gustave Flaubert, its author, was made to stand trial for "immorality".Since then, the brilliant, cynical story of Emma Bovary, who revolts against her bourgeois surroundings and her marriage only to find profound disillusionment in the arms of a shallow lover, has come to be regarded as one the masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature.Flaubert's aim was to give an impersonal, objective account of emotions and events, without any of the moralizing which was then the literary fashion. His Madame Bovary stands today as the perfect model of fictional "realism".
SQUADROOM 87TH PRECINCTFour cops getting through a routine day. Complaints, interrogations, reports--holdups, beatings, rapes, murders.Then in walks a dame in black."Yes?" asks Detective Cotton Hawes.She reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out a cold, hard object."This is a .38," she says and points it at the four men. "Give me your guns.""Look, Lady," says Hawes, "put up the piece. The joke's not funny."The dame's eyes narrow to slits. "Shut up, Copper. I've come here to kill. One phony move and I keep shooting until every man in this place is dead."
"Hardboiled" would be the only word to describe this book. The plot involves a stolen corpse, competing gangsters and a murdered morgue attendant (you can see the murderer bringing down a cosh on the poor guy's head to the right of the cover.) Oh yes, and there are sundry Dangerous Dames floating about the story (including a group of taxi dancers in a sleazy dance hall.)
Lively DEATH
PRIVATE EYE, WILLIAM CRANE, juggles with the identity of one dead blonde and sundry live ones, cuts grim mortuary capers over a volcano of violence and reminds us that there's no place--in crime fiction--like Chicago!
The fan dancer is very much in evidence on the cover. Not so her horse!If you find a couple of ostrich-plume fans and a pair of white dancing slippers and advertise it in a "Found" column, you don't expect to receive a reply about a lost horse. Yet that was what happened to Perry Mason after he and Della Street had witnessed a car accident. It was amusing, intriguing, yet very deadly - particularly deadly.But then he is visited by John Callender, who says he is acting on behalf of "Cherie Chi-Chi", a fan dancer. And hot on his heels comes Mr. Arthur Sheldon, also trying to claim possession of the horse.So it appears there is a horse! That maybe... but there is certainly one of the most beautiful clients Perry Mason has ever had, and presently, there is also a corpse, attached to a Japanese sword.
With a cover like this you'd certainly expect your detective to be more than a little hard boiled--drinking neat whiskey in his lonely office between romancing dangerous dames and fighting it out with toughs on the waterfront. Instead the detective in this story is a retired Victorian governess with a fondness for knitting and Lord Tennyson.A huge ugly old house, hordes of friends and relations--and a young man with information to sell and suppress.A perfect setting for a murder--and forMISS SILVER.
