The last time I was seriously online was Friday, which was when Hurricane Earl had us in New England squarely in his sights and was barreling up the coast toward us. Most of the projections were correct, though, and the storm missed us … by that much.

   We scurried around outside the house though, picking up and storing in the garage the table and chairs on the deck and anything else strong winds might pick up and dash down the street, or through a window, just in case. Sometime preparations in advance work, and it did this time. All we got was 15 minutes of rain and no wind to speak of.

   Just a little excitement to start the beginning of September and the end of summer. Wish I could say that postings on this blog are going to become a little less erratic, but I don’t think I can. Bear with me. I didn’t mean to go quiet all weekend, but that’s the way it turned out. It wasn’t planned; it just happened.

   I also am hoping to get caught up on email sometime soon. If you haven’t heard from me in a while, and you were expecting to, I apologize. Your only consolation might be that you’re not alone. I’ll try to do better.

   Looking back, I didn’t do a lot of reading in August, and that frustrates me, but everything I’ve read has been reported on here. Not reviewed have been six or so movies, but it’s been too long since I’ve seen them for me to report on them with any feeling that I could do them justice. You’ll have to wait until I watch them again, which I may.

   What follows are some announcements of sorts, some of this and more of that, as the heading says. Some might deserve posts of their own, but in order to cover them all quickly, I’ll combine them into this one long post.

    ● First of all, I’d like to to remind you that Dan Stumpf’s book ’Nada, as by Daniel Boyd, which I previewed here last July has now been published. You can buy it from Amazon and other online sources, and if I may once again, I strongly recommend that you do.

   I’ve just posted a version of my review of the book on Amazon, but I see that both Bill Crider and George Kelley have beaten me to it. (All three of us have given it five stars.)

    ● Ken Johnson has asked me to mention that he’s revised and expanded his checklist of the digest-sized paperbacks that were published mostly in the 1940s. I’m happy to do so, and in fact what I will do is publish his note to me in full:

    “I want to let people know that The Digest Index, my online reference to digest-size paperbacks, which was originally posted two and a half years ago, has now been substantially revised and reposted. It is hosted by Bruce Black on his Bookscans website and can be accessed here: http://bookscans.com/Publishers/digestindex/digestindex.htm

    “Among the revisions are the addition of 11 new imprints, the addition of series information into both author indexes (to books and contents), and the addition of artist identifications into the publisher index. Because I still lack a lot of cover artist data, I did not attempt a full artist index but instead supplied a summary of which imprints each artist was mentioned under and plugged in scanned samples of their signatures. This is in addition to tightening up the original data with more identification of abridgments and retitles, as well as additional personal data for a number of authors.

    “I’ve put a lot of effort into this Index, but it still has a lot of holes in it. Additions and corrections are always welcome. Actually, feedback of any kind is welcome; I get the sense sometimes that hardly anyone has seen it.”

   To which I reply, while I don’t go there every day, I do find the need to refer to it at least once a week. A large percentage of these books were either mysteries and westerns, making the information for me very useful. It’s a remarkable piece of work. Check it out!

    ● Finally, a comment left by the anonymous PB210 following my review of a Hugh North novel by Van Wyck Mason needs some additional exposure, I thought:

    “I tried to compare the Hugh North novels to other long running secret agent novel series by one author:

    “So far based on what I have written above, De Villiers has the overall record, while Van Wyck Mason has the record in the English language. Others more knowledgeable may have thought of a longer series by one author.

    “Anyone have any information about Herbert New?”

   I’ve not had a chance to check any of PB210’s data, nor do I know the Herbert New to whom he refers in his last question, but comments and suggestions of other authors are most certainly welcome.

MICHELLE NOLAN – Ball Tales: A Study of Baseball, Basketball and Football Fiction of the 1930’s through 1960’s. McFarland, hardcover, February 2010.

   Over the decades I have collected just about every pulp genre except for love pulps and sport pulps. I have several issues of each type, but every time I’d try to read a romance or sports story, the strict formula that these magazines followed would defeat me.

   Most of the fiction was very upbeat with happy endings, even more formula-bound than the western pulps. At least I can read the other genres (western, SF, detective, adventure, etc), but not the love and sport pulps.

   And this prejudice is not mine alone. I’ve come across a few collectors like Digges La Touche and Steve Lewis who occasionally buy a love pulp, but until I met Michelle Nolan and possibly Randy Vanderbeek, I never really met someone who was seriously collecting runs of sport and love magazines.

   At PulpFest 2010 I had an opportunity to talk to Michelle and we briefly discussed her book, Love on the Racks, which mainly covers the romance comics with a few pages on the love pulps. But the main topic was her new book recently published by McFarland, Ball Tales. Copies are available on amazon.com for $35.00.

   If you are at all interested in sports fiction, then you should buy this book. The book mainly discusses sport fiction in books and paperbacks. However pulps are referred to in several chapters, and this is of course of interest to pulp collectors. I counted around 20 cover illustrations of pulps showing a sports scene and many other photos of book covers.

   The book is 279 pages long. Pulps are discussed in Chapter One, but the main subject is dime novels. Chapter Two is titled “The Great Pulp Sports Rally During the Depression” and covers sport fiction in many of the pulps like Argosy, Sport Story, and so on.

   However the best chapter on the pulps (this chapter is a nice long 32 pages) is Chapter Five where Michelle covers sports in many sport and even some love titles. She then covers in Chapter Twelve the only example of female sports competition portrayed on a sports cover (Sport Story, 1st March 1939). This is a very interesting observation when you consider that there were over 1500 sport pulp magazine covers.

   She also covers the fact that there have been very few sport pulp anthologies, only three that she lists. Think of it; we live in the Golden Age of Pulp Reprints, but no sport or love reprints from the pulps. (I quickly ordered the three anthologies from abebooks.com).

   Finally there is a very valuable appendix: three pages listing the different sport pulp titles, publishers, and years published.

   Fellow pulp readers and collectors, this is an excellent piece of original research and if you love sports fiction, or you collect pulps,then it should be in your library.

ADDENDA:  Three anthologies taken entirely from the sports pulps are:

Baseball Round-Up, edited by Leo Margulies (Cupples & Leon, 1948).

All American Football Stories, edited by Leo Margulies (Cupples & Leon, 1949).

While the Crowd Cheers, edited by David C. Cooke (E. P. Dutton, 1953)

   Michelle also calls The Argosy Book of Sports Stories edited by Rogers Terrill “wonderful,” but these came from the time when Argosy was a men’s adventure magazine, not a pulp. Buy the hardback (A. S. Barnes, 1953) because the paperback (Pennant P-61, 1954) cuts five stories.

JOANNA DRAYTON – Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. HarperCollins, Australia, hardcover, January 2008; softcover, 2009.

   The first biography of Ngaio Marsh following Margaret Lewis’s Ngaio Marsh: A Life (1991, reprinted by Poison Pen Press, 1998), is this book by Joanna Drayton. Published by HarperCollins of New Zealand, it is evidently unavailable for direct purchase in the United States, providing, perhaps, further evidence that big publishers are losing interest in marketing Golden Age British authors in the their greatest potential market (Christie and Sayers excepted).

   In Britain, Harper recently has reprinted Marsh’s ouevre in three-volume, 800-plus page ominbuses; yet in the U.S. no new edition has been seen, I believe, since the late 1990s, about a dozen years ago. This is a shame, because I notice from Amazon.com reviews that Marsh seems to be more positively received in the U.S. than in Britain; and in New Zealand, Marsh’s home turf, she has been, according to Joanne Drayton, largely forgotten as a writer. (Rather amazingly, considering that she must be, one would think, the country’s best-selling native author.)

   Perhaps this explains why it has been hard to find reviews for Drayton’s book, which was published two years ago. When one compares the publicity in Britain given to the 2008 biography of Agatha Christie (the first substantive new one in nearly twenty-five years), Laura Thompson’s Agatha Christie: An English Mystery, with the paucity of that afforded Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime, the contrast is striking. It’s too bad, because Ngaio Marsh unquestionably is one of the most significant writers of classical mysteries associated with Britain’s Golden Age of detective fiction.

   Yet, while I would have liked for Drayton’s book (and resultingly Ngaio Marsh) to have received more attention than it did, I have mixed feelings about how much it has added to the prior work on Marsh by Margaret Lewis.

   First, a comment on physical aspects of the two books. HarperCollins designed an excellent, striking jacket, attractive endpapers and chapter headings and even provided a built-in book marker in the manner of Library of America, all of which is quite nice to see (though, as is often the case today, the paper is too thin and the print too light and indistinct, especially in contrast with the Poison Pen Press edition of Lewis’s book).

   However, I was rather amazed to see that the Drayton book, though it has notes and a select bibliography, is lacking an index! I find that quite irritating.

   Going on — finally — to the subject matter, I find the Drayton book superior to the Lewis in some ways, inferior in others. On the negative side, Drayton’s book seemed less informative on Ngaio’s youth and her parents, especially her father, than Lewis’s. I felt I learned more about Marsh’s home influences and family background from Lewis.

   Drayton gives much more information about Marsh’s life in the theater, but then Lewis writes a great deal about this as well. (I admit these sections of both books I skimmed over.)

   On the other hand, Drayton’s discussions of Marsh’s detective novels are superior to those by Lewis. This was an area I felt Lewis rather skimped, given the importance of this work. (Let’s be honest: would two biographies of Ngaio Marsh have been published had Marsh not been a very successful mystery author.)

   Nonetheless I was not fully satisfied with Drayton’s discussion of the books. She never really integrates themes throughout Marsh’s work, so the whole thing comes off as interesting in spots, but piecemeal (the discussions of the later books from the last fifteen years of Marsh’s life are less thorough as well — or are the books just less interesting?). Drayton provides a better Golden Age context for Marsh’s writing, yet it’s really just the four “Crime Queens” yet again.

   The sole focus on the Crime Queens is somewhat ahistorical in my view. For most of the Golden Age, there were two reigning Crime Queens: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

   Allingham didn’t really fully emerge in her resplendent royal robes until the trio of Flowers for the Judge (1936), Dancers in Mourning (1937) and The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), I would say.

   And Marsh was not well recognized until after her trio of Artists in Crime (1938), Death in a White Tie (1938) and Overture to Death (1939).

   Even then, Marsh was only picked up by a big U.S. publisher, Little, Brown and Company (publishers of J. J. Connington), after Overture to Death was published; and it was Little, Brown who secured Marsh’s crown safely on her head with Surfeit of Lampreys (1940/41), still today generally considered her best book.

   So while Allingham and Marsh were Crime Queens, their reigns commenced during the waning of the Golden Age. (Arguably, they had something to do with that waning, at least if by “Golden Age” we mean a period when the puzzle was considered the keystone of the detective novel — it’s clear many readers read Marsh and Allingham more as novels of manners than as pure detective novels.)

   We also get the usual W. H. Auden stuff about how “normality was always restored” in Golden Age detective novels, etc. Well, that’s not true, but, hey, hopefully I’ll get my whack at this in print with the “Humdrum” books and the follow-up, more general survey I’m working on now.

   Despite my carping, I’ll emphasize again that the discussion of Marsh’s detective fiction is more interesting in Drayton than in Lewis (though make sure you read Doug Greene’s introduction to Alleyn and Others: The Collected Short Works of Ngaio Marsh as well!).

   Sometimes Drayton is a little ingenuous. She makes much of the “Marsh Million Murders” (this is a chapter title in her book), when, in 1950, I believe it was, Penguin reprinted ten Marsh titles in 100,000 printing runs. (Lewis noted this as well, but did not make such a fuss about it.)

   Drayton references Howard Haycraft in Murder for Pleasure from nearly a decade earlier about how the average detective novel sold only 1500-2000 copies (because most were read through libraries, not purchased).

   But Drayton is comparing apples and oranges to some extent here. Clearly, the Marsh Penguin deal is impressive, but Drayton needed to look at post-war paperback sales of other authors for a really accurate comparison. This was the time of the great paperback revolution and other authors, like, say, Spillane, Chandler and Stout were blowing them out in paperback too, surely.

   I smiled a bit when Drayton wrote that Marsh’s output of ten novels in seven years was “extraordinary.” Well, it’s certainly not slacking, but it’s not extraordinary by genre standards of the time, as a look at the output of, say, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts or John Street makes clear.

   I was reminded of an old SCTV skit where Olivia Newton John gets booked on a talk show with some porn stars and when they find out she’s made nine films or what have you in her whole career, they scoff, telling her they make nine films in a month!

   To be fair, however, Lewis had some odd moments too, like when she writes that The Nursing Home Murder is Marsh’s most popular book — can this really be right? there is no citation of this claim — and when she states that that in the U.S. after WW2 Marsh was “much preferred” to Agatha Christie, because people there no longer wanted to read about Hercule Poirot.

   However, Drayton’s book is a biography, not a literary study, so presumably some people will be most interested in this book for what it tells us about Marsh’s personal life. The big story here is Drayton speculates about Marsh, having been a lesbian, something the previous biographer eschewed doing.

   Marsh “was fiercely protective of her private life,” the jacket flap tells us, “No one knows better how to cover tracks and remove incriminating evidence than a crime fiction writer.” I find the “A-ha! we caught her out!” tone of this comment rather distasteful. To incriminate means to accuse someone of a wrongful act — surely HarperCollins did not mean to take the position that lesbianism is “wrongful.”

   Be that as it may, Drayton writes more in depth about a life-long female friend of Marsh’s, Sylvia Fox, than did Lewis, who only mentioned Fox sporadically. Drayton says she left the matter of whether Fox and Marsh had a lesbian relationship for readers to decide, though I think it’s pretty clear from her book that she implies that they did.

   The two women apparently took several trips together. Fox in 1963, when both women were in their late sixties, moved to a cottage that neighbored Marsh’s and a path was cut though a hedge so that they could conveniently visit each other.

   When Marsh was nearing death she destroyed a lot of papers (that “incriminating” evidence?). When Fox died a decade after Marsh, her headstone was placed beside Marsh’s. “They were the closest of friends, companions and neighbours in life and will be for eternity,” Drayton concludes. (This is even the concluding line of the book.)

   I had always wondered myself whether Marsh might have been a lesbian. I suppose Drayton’s book moves the ball somewhat in that direction; yet Marsh “always” denied she was a lesbian, according to Drayton and it’s certainly possible that the two women may merely have been close friends. Who knows?

   The larger problem with Drayton’s book as a biography is that it never really gets us any closer to the personality of the woman than Lewis’s. (Indeed, Lewis may have been a bit better here.) Marsh was a very guarded person and thus a tough nut to crack in a biography.

   Lesbianism does not seem to have been a theme of Marsh’s books, even implicitly. (There is a lesbian character in Singing in the Shrouds, whom, oddly, Drayton does not discuss.)

   Gay men appear in her books, invariably, as I recall, as stereotypical “queen” types — amusing up to a point, but hardly different from conventional portrayals. In contrast with Mary Fitt, who definitely was a lesbian, and Gladys Mitchell, who has been said to have been one, I do not really get that “feel” from Marsh’s books.

   Thus, while the matter of Marsh’s sexuality probably at this late date will never be resolved, I’m not sure how relevant it is to her analyses of her work anyway.

   So, should you buy this book? If you have the Lewis already, I’d say it’s a judgment call. On the whole, I would say Drayton’s is the more interesting work, but the Lewis has some points in its favor as well. Meanwhile, there’s still room for a really definitive critical study of the woman’s book on crime, which to me are even more interesting than her “life in crime.”

EARL BARGAINNIER, Editor – Comic Crime. Popular Press, hardcover, 1987; trade paperback, 1988.

   As the title implies, this collection of essays deals with comedy in the mystery and is the first book on the subject in my memory.

   It is also one which is far-reaching, covering humor in the Sherlock Holmes canon (Holmes and Watson were really the first “Odd Couple”), the academic mysteries, in mysteries set in quaint little villages, and in those featuring little old lady and gentlemen detectives.

   Even the hardboiled mystery gets its due in “Laughing with the Corpses,” by Frederick Isaac. Unfortunately, Craig Rice is virtually ignored throughout, but there is an excellent piece on Donald Westlake by Michael Dunne.

   There are fourteen essays in the book and not a bad one in the lot. Some.of the examples the authors quote will make you laugh again if they are familiar; others will make you want to seek out the books from which they were taken.

Editorial Comment:   This is the sixth in a series of reviews in which Marv covered reference works published in 1987, books about the field of mystery and crime fiction. Preceding this one was Corridors of Deceit, by Peter Wolfe. You can find it here.

PETER WOLFE РCorridors of Deceit: The World of John Le Carr̩. Popular Press, hardcover/trade paperback, 1987.

   Peter Wolfe’s Corridors of Deceit is a subtle analysis of the man who brought realism (and, for me, boredom) to the spy story. I clearly am in the minority, as the Best-Seller charts show.

   Fans of Le Carré will find this book satisfying because Wolfe is a perceptive writer, as he showed several years ago in his analysis of the works of Hammett, Beams Falling. His may well be the definitive book on the most popular serious spy novelist of our time.

Editorial Comment:   This is the fifth in a series of reviews in which Marv covered reference works published in 1987, books about the field of mystery and crime fiction. Preceding this one was Campion’s Career, by B. A. Pike. You can find it here.

B. A. PIKE – Campion’s Career: A Study of the Novels of Margery Allingham. Popular Press, hardcover/trade paperback, 1987.

   While primarily of interest to a limited audience, B(arry) A. Pike’s Campion’s Career is a loving evocation of the creation of one of the great writers of the detective story’s golden age.

   Pike conveys the wit and wisdom of Allingham and the complex character she invented, deftly showing Camplon’s evolution from a silly ass to a wise and avuncular detective.

   I recommend it without reservation to all who have read Allingham. I suspect that those who haven’t will get more by reading the original first, then reading Pike on Allingham.

Editorial Comments:   It is may not be complete, but Google does have the book online, most if not all. You can check it out here.

   This is the fourth in a series of reviews in which Marv covered reference works published in 1987, books about the field of mystery and crime fiction. Preceding this one was An Introduction to the Detective Story, by LeRoy Lad Panek. You can find it here.

       Previously on this blog:

Call for Campion Complete, by Mike Nevins (the Campion short stories)
Tether’s End (reviewed by Tina Karelson)
Death of a Ghost (a 1001 Midnights review by Thomas Baird)
Mr Campion and Others (reviewed by Mike Tooney)
Dancers in Mourning (reviewed by Steve Lewis)

LEROY LAD PANEK – An Introduction to the Detective Story. Popular Press, Bowling Green University, hardcover/trade paperback, 1987.

   If LeRoy Lad Panek’s An Introduction to the Detective Story seems like a textbook for a college course on the mystery, veteran readers should not be put off. Panek, a former Edgar winner, is more knowledgeable than anyone has a right to be, especially regarding the mystery before Poe.

   Yet, the book is equally strong for its frequent wit, proving that writing about the mystery can be fun. Insights and historical perspective leap off every page.

   Panek devotes considerable space to the usually neglected turn-of-the-twentieth-century writers, after pointing out that “Doyle’s first 24 Sherlock Holmes stories created such a demand they turned people into detective-story writers overnight.”

   Though giving full credit to Doyle and his creation in as good a one-chapter summary as I can recall, he points out Doyle’s weaknesses as a novelist — but also his strengths as a short-story writer.

   Both the Golden Age and the rise of the hardboiled mystery are well handled. Regarding the former, Panek is persuasive how the classic puzzles were a double reaction on the part of writers and readers to the mindless thriller as well as avant garde mainstream fiction, with its de-emphasis on story.

   Private eyes like Race Williams and the Continental Op are correctly pointed out as contemporaries of Doyle, thus reminding us that hardboiled fiction, after more than sixty years, is just as traditional a form of the genre as the classic puzzles.

   Considering the amount of information Panek dispenses, he makes relatively few factual errors. The Detective Book Club is misnamed the “Detective Story Club.” Mary Roberts Rinehart is said to have died in 1926, though she lived on for more than thirty years longer.

   Christie’s And Then There Were None is dated 1930, not 1939. Dennis Wheatley’s “File” books did contain narratives, though through letters, telegrams, and police reports, rather than the usual story-telling devices.

   I also would quarrel with Panek’s loose use of psychological terminology. He refers to “psychotic” heroines of Gothic novels when they were only nervous, usually due to their mysterious employers and those single lights which kept shining in windows.

   Vidocq is called a “paranoiac” when even Panek’s description shows him to be merely self-promoting. A reference to “pathological insanity” is surely redundant, since I doubt if any doctors have seen cases of insanity without mental pathology.

   Panek’s book may be the best history of the entire field written to date. If ever a book deserved a second printing, It is An Introduction to the Detective Story. That would afford an opportunity to clear up some of the errors and would mean it had reached the substantial audience it deserves.

Editorial Comment:   This is the third in a series of reviews in which Marv covered reference works published in 1987, books about the field of mystery and crime fiction. Preceding this one was Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, by H. R. F. Keating. You can find it here.

H. R. F. KEATING – Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books. Carroll & Graf, US, hardcover, November 1987; trade paperback, October 1996. Xanadu, UK, hardcover, 1987.

   H.R.F. Keating proves he is a man after my own heart by compiling a list of the one-hundred best mysteries in Crime and Mystery. One can quarrel with some of Keating’s selections; one always will with any list of “bests.”

   He leaves out R. Austin Freeman, Alice Tilton, and Stuart Palmer because they are not presently available, but they certainly are in the US, thanks to recent reprints. Keating does not include Dick Francis because he only writes stories of “pure suspense.” Yet, Francis includes plenty of crime and mystery in his plots and has even given us a series detective, Sid Halley.

   On the other hand, Keating does not like Nicholas Freeling (I don’t either) but includes him because he is considered “important.” There, Keating should have stuck with his personal taste.

   No one could make up a list of one-hundred books and expect total agreement. What is remarkable about Crime and Mystery is that most of Keating’s selections are remarkably sound, and his two-page essays on each are masterpieces of succinct criticism, with superb use of metaphor. This is an indispensable guide to the literature we like best.

Editorial Comment:   This is the second in a series of reviews in which Marv covered reference works published in 1987, books about the field of mystery and crime fiction. Preceding this one was Son of Gun in Cheek, by Bill Pronzini. You can find it here.

BILL PRONZINI – Son of Gun in Cheek. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1987; trade paperback, 1988.

   Nineteen-eighty-seven was not a vintage year for books about the mystery. There were only eight submitted for Edgar consideration, and they broke no new ground. Yet, in terms of enjoyment many can be wholeheartedly recommended.

   There was, first of all, Bill Pronzini’s Son of Gun in Cheek, the even funnier sequel to his 1982 Gun in Cheek (reprinted in 1987 by Mysterious Press in trade paperback), the book which should have won that year’s Edgar.

   If you liked Pronzini’s first compilation of inadvertent, but hilariously funny, bad lines from the mystery, you won’t want to miss his second as he takes off after such creators of “alternate classics” as F.M. Pettee, James Corbett, and Michael Avallone.

   More famous authors come In for their share of notice, especially when their copy editors let them down. Thus we get lines like the ones quoted from Brett Halliday’s The Violent World of Michael Shayne: “He poured himself a drink and counted the money. It came to ten thousand even, mostly in fifties and twenty-fives.”

   There is also a section regarding B movies, especially the old Charlie Chan films. It’s all deftly organized, with some deliberately funny lines by Pronzini himself as a bridge. I read the book on my flight to Minneapolis for Bouchercon and attracted a bit of attention when I couldn’t keep from laughing out loud. Who said scholarship can’t be fun?

Editorial Comments:   Here’s another– “The blonde strolled to the cabin and unlocked the door. She went in, leaving the door invitingly open. I looked at it and my red corpuscles began to get redder.”    (Milton K. Ozaki, Dressed to Kill.)

   Marv used his entire column in this particular issue of The MYSTERY FANcier to cover reference works published in 1987, books about the field of mystery and crime fiction. They (the books) won’t all be as funny as this one, and in fact I can guarantee that none of them will be. I’ll be reprinting these reviews over the next weeks on this blog. Even though Marv’s comments are 22 years old, for the most part they’re far from out of date.

Previously reviewed on this blog:

      Gun in Cheek (by Mike Tooney)

JOHN CURRAN – Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks. HarperCollins, hardcover, September 2009.

   Since John Curran is the literary adviser to the Agatha Christie estate he was allowed to enter the two locked rooms of her house after it was donated to the National Trust and opened to tourists.

   The two rooms mostly contained copies and first editions of her various novels, story collections and plays but in the smaller room, on the bottom shelf of a bookcase, he found a cardboard box containing notebooks in which Christie jotted down various story ideas and preliminary plotting for most of her novels, stories and plays.

   These notebooks were in no manner orderly; when Christie had an idea she grabbed a notebook at random and jotted it down on the first blank page available. So notes for various of her works are scattered, most of them in more than one notebook and the numbers on them mean nothing as to when she made her entries.

   Also, despite what is printed on the dust jacket, none of the notebooks contains any of the plot ideas for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd nor Murder on the Orient Express and a few others of her works. (He never discusses Witness for the Prosecution, play or story, so I’m presuming that might be another.) The notes for those works presumably are lost. What is here is an abundance of ideas used and rejected for most of the things Christie wrote.

   One thing Curran discovered was that the last Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, was written in the late 40’s and not during World War II as previously believed. (Curtain is another book not covered here.)

   Sleeping Murder‘s original title was going to be Cover Her Face, but it was changed after P. D. James used that title. The two major finds, however, are unpublished short stories featuring Hercule Poirot, which are printed at the end of his commentary.

   The first story was “The Capture Of Cerberus” the 12th Labor Of Hercules. From November, 1939 through most of 1940 the first 11 Labors had been published by the Strand Magazine. It wasn’t until 1947 that she wrote the 12th story which completed the Labors and made possible the collection of that title.

   This original story was unsuitable for pretty obvious reasons: It features a character clearly based on Adolf Hitler and portrays him in a favorable light since, in this story, he has a change of heart and becomes a proponent of World Peace, which would have been pretty hard to swallow with bombs falling on London.

   And though Curran doesn’t say so it in his notes, a plot device turns up that was used in Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign Correspondent: the kidnapping of a political figure and his replacement by a double who is then assassinated.

   The other story is called “The Incident Of The Dog’s Ball.” This is much better, but was never offered for publication because it is a 20 page version of what was to become the novel Dumb Witness (Poirot Loses a Client). Christie must have realized she could easily turn it into a novel so never sent it to her agent.

   Finally, if you haven’t read a lot of Agatha Christie’s output and are planning to, be warned: before every chapter Curran states which novels and stories will have their solutions revealed in his discussion.

   I finished Christie’s detective novels and stories and some of her plays (she wrote 20) a long time ago so that didn’t bother me. For those who haven’t, you might put off reading this until after you have. Also, Curran uses the politically incorrect (racist) original title for And Then There Were None when talking about that book.