ClimbingSky

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Cozy Mystery Fiction

Book Reviews

  • FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Auden on Detectives

    Completely satisfactory detectives are extremely rare. Indeed, I only know of three: Sherlock Holmes(Conan Doyle), Inspector French (Freeman Wills Crofts), and Father Brown (Chesterton). The job of the detective is to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one. Since the murderer who caused their disjunction is the aesthetically defiant individual, his opponent,… Read more

  • FRIDAY FOOD FOR THOUGHT: P.D. James on The Art of Short Stories

    The scope of the short story is inevitably restricted and this means it is most effective when it deals with a single incident or one dominant idea. It is the originality and strength of this idea which largely determines the success of the story. Although it is far less complex in structure than a novel,… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “The Girl Who Loved Graveyards”by P.D. James

    P.D. James (1920-2014) had to leave school at the age of 16 to take care of younger siblings and because her father did not believe that women needed higher education. Anyone who has ever read P.D. James knows that this early departure from formal education does not appear to have hampered her ability to become… Read more

  • FRIDAY FOOD FOR THOUGHT: David Gordon on Mysteries

    “A crime disturbs the status quo; we readers get to enjoy the transgressive thrill, then observe approvingly as the detective, agent of social order, sets things right at the end.  We finish our coca and tuck ourselves in, safe and sound….But what this theory fails to take into account is the next book, the next… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “The Wife of Kenite” by Agatha Christie

    I have a stereotype of Agatha Christie based on the very few Hercule Poirot novels and short stories I have read thus far. The stereotype is that she writes classic Cozy Mysteries. Cozy Mysteries are a sub-genre of crime fiction in which sex and violence occur offstage, the detective is usually an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “The Euthanasia of Hilary’s Aunt” by Cyril Hare

    The Short-Story form allows writers to be more “playful” than they could be in a longer form. TExperiment, even cheat a little, if you will. All in the name of entertainment. Cyril Hare was the pen name of Alfred Clark a barrister and a member of the famous Detection Club. He wrote a number of… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “Bread Upon the Waters” by A.A. Milne

    One of the most enjoyable things about reading short story anthologies is the number of pleasant surprises you get. In the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (the 1920s & 1930s) everyone who wrote in Britain tried their hand at mysteries. Even Winnie-the-Pooh’s famous creator, A.A. Milne. Milne’s short story “Bread Upon the Waters” is an… Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: The Corpse in the Waxworks by John Dickson Carr

    I recently reviewed the John Dickson Carr novel Castle Skull here at ClimbingSky, which I liked very much. When I went online to my local library to find another book in the British Library Crime Classics Series to read this Carr novel, The Corpse in the Waxworks, immediately caught my eye. In The Corpse in… Read more

  • Golden Age Detective Fiction

    For some reason I have been reading a lot of Golden Age Detective Fiction of late. The Golden Age of Detective Fiction is generally considered to be the kind of mysteries written in the 1920s and 1930s, primarily in Britain. What that means is that I have been reading novels by and short story collections… Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: Murder by the Book, ed. by Martin Edwards

    The Bibliomystery is a sub-genre of Mysteries that I greatly enjoy. Bibliomysteries, as their name implies, are mysteries deeply intertwined with books and the literary world. These stories might involve the theft of a rare edition, the murder of a bookseller, or shady dealings within a publishing house. The defining characteristic is a substantial connection… Read more