Tag Archives: mystery

Friday Face Off: clocks

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Friday Face Off

The Friday Face-Off was originally created by Books by Proxy:
each Friday, bloggers showcase book covers on a weekly theme.
Visit Lynn’s Books (@LynnsBooks) for a list of upcoming themes.
Please visit also Tammy at Books, Bones & Buffy (@tammy_sparks)
thanks to whom I discovered this meme.

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This week, the theme is
“Rage against the machine – anything, cogs, clockwork, AI“

I’ve gone simple with Clocks, and featuring here one of Agatha Christie’s novels:

The Clocks

The Clocks was published in 1963. I listened to it when I did my project of listening to all of Hercule Poirot. This is #30 in the series.

It’s great at the beginning, then I found it a bit slow. The plot was much more complex than it looked, despise what Hercule Poirot said.
The neat thing is the reference Agatha Christie makes to many authors of crime fiction – in Chapter 14.
There’s also a cool description of how books can take over your place or your world!
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“Sheila Webb, typist-for-hire, has arrived at 19 Wilbraham Crescent in the seaside town of Crowdean to accept a new job. What she finds is a well-dressed corpse surrounded by five clocks. Mrs. Pebmarsh, the blind owner of No. 19, denies all knowledge of ringing Sheila’s secretarial agency and asking for her by name — yet someone did. Nor does she own that many clocks. And neither woman seems to know the victim.
Colin Lamb, a young intelligence specialist working a case of his own at the nearby naval yard, happens to be on the scene at the time of Sheila Webb’s ghastly discovery. Lamb knows of only one man who can properly investigate a crime as bizarre and baffling as what happened inside No. 19 — his friend and mentor, Hercule Poirot. “
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Click on the picture below if you want to identify the various editions
You can also right click and ‘open image in new tab’ to zoom in

Clocks

My favorite cover is the Dutch edition, for its cleverness. Funny that no other illustrator thought of that! Too bad it’s not more artistically done.

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Have you read this book?
WHICH COVER IS YOUR FAVORITE? WHY?
My next participation may be on Friday, September 23:
“Tough Travel Tropes – Coming of Age”

Book review: The Bride Wore Black

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The Bride Wore Black

The Bride Wore Black,
by Cornell Woolrich
First published in 1940.
Read in this edition:
January 5, 2021
American Mystery Classics,
Penzler Publishers
Crime fiction / Noir fiction
288 pages
Goodreads

My tastes in literature are evolving, and right now I am really enjoying discovering old timers in mystery.
The Bride Wore Black had been on my Classics list for a while, and it turned out to be the latest Classic Spin.
I was planning to read it in July, but then I walked to the library, and the book called me from the shelf. I devoured it in a couple of days. It’s probably the very first time I tackle my classic spin so quickly!
Read on to know why. Click to continue reading

The Classics Club: what I got for The Classics Spin #30

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classicsclub

#theclassicsclub
#ccspin

The Classics Club
2020-2025

MY FULL CLASSICS CLUB LIST IS HERE

The Classics Spin #30

Twitter hashtag: #ccspin

For this Classics spin #30, I got #5 which on my list was

The Bride Wore Black

The Bride Wore Black was published in 1940.
A classic noir mystery? Perfect for the summer!
I plan on reading it in July.

“When the wealthy ladies’ man fell from his balcony in the midst of his engagement party, the police dismissed the death as the result of a freak accident. There was nothing to connect it with the poisoning of a lonely man in his squalid apartment, or with the married business-man killed after him, sealed into a closet and left to suffocate. No connection, that is, aside from the appearance of a beautiful woman in each case, just before the victims met their untimely ends.
Nobody knows her identity, where she comes from or whither she goes. Nor do they know why anyone would be targeting this series of seemingly-unrelated persons. But one police detective is convinced that the answers to these questions can save the lives of men who might be next on the list, men who will continue to die at a rapid rate unless he can solve the puzzle and intervene.
Cornell Woolrich’s first crime novel, The Bride Wore Black is the stylish, tense thriller that launched the career of “the supreme master of suspense” (New York Times). It was filmed by Francois Truffaut under the same title, and went on to inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.”

About the Author:

Cornell WoolrichCornell Woolrich (1903-1968)
is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s finest writer of pure suspense fiction.
The author of numerous classic novels and short stories (many of which were turned into classic films) such as Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Waltz Into Darkness, and I Married a Dead Man, Woolrich began his career in the 1920s writing mainstream novels that won him comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The bulk of his best-known work, however, was written in the field of crime fiction, often appearing serialized in pulp magazines or as paperback novels.
Because he was prolific, he found it necessary to publish under multiple pseudonyms, including “William Irish” and “George Hopley“.
Woolrich lived a life as dark and emotionally tortured as any of his unfortunate characters and died, alone, in a seedy Manhattan hotel room following the amputation of a gangrenous leg. Upon his death, he left a bequest of one million dollars to Columbia University, to fund a scholarship for young writers.

Have you read it, or any other novel by Cornell Woolrich?
What did you think?

It’s never too late to challenge yourself to (re)discover the classics and connect and have fun with other Classics lovers. See here what this is all about.

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Here is what I got for the previous Classics Spins:

A wizard of Earthsea Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Arsene Lupin

For Classics Spin #14, I got #1: A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
For Classics Spin, #15, I got #12: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick
For Classics Spin, #16, I got #4: Arsène Lupin, by Maurice Leblanc

The Face of Another A Moveable Feast The Dream of the Red Chamber

For Classics Spin, #17, I got #3: The Face of Another, by Kobo Abe (not yet reviewed!!)

For Classics Spin, #19, I got #1: A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway

For Classics Spin, #20, I got # 19: The Dream of the Red Chamber
by Cao Xueqin

On the Edge of the World  Sanshiro The Sleepwalkers

For Classics Spin, #21, I got # 5: On the Edge of the World, by Nikolai Leskov

For Classics Spin, #22, I got # 13: Sanshiro, by Natsume Soseki

For Classics Spin, #24, I got # 18: The Sleepwalkers, by Hermann Broch, which I didn’t take time to read!!

The Letter Killers Club History in English Words A Man Lay Dead

For Classics Spin, #25, I got # 14: The Letter Killers Club – which was way over my head.

For Classics Spin, #26, I got # 11: History in English Words, by Owen Barfield, a fascinating book, which I haven’t reviewed yet!!

For Classics Spin, #28, I got # 12: A Man Lay Dead, by Ngaio Marsh, alas a disappointing one.

The Man in the Queue

For Classics Spin, #29, I got # 11: The Man in the Queue, by Josephine Tey.
Not yet reviewed, but it was a very impressive title, and I now want to read the whole series.

 

 

 

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HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK?
WHAT DID YOU THINK?
IF YOU ARE MEMBER OF THE CLASSICS CLUB,
WHAT BOOK DID YOU GET FOR THIS SPIN?

MY FULL CLASSICS CLUB LIST IS HERE

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