Thu 5 Feb 2026
Archived Mystery Review: AMELIA REYNOLDS LONG – Murder to Type.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
AMELIA REYNOLDS LONG – Murder to Type. Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1943.
Blood type, that is. A blackmailer is given the wrong type of blood during an emergency transfusion in a doctor’s office. (The doctor is among those being blackmailed, and so is his female ward.)
Lawyer Stephen Carter. brother of the D.A., does the detective work. While he has a light-hearted view of the world, Long takes the whole affair very seriously. Midst the flutter and clutter, though, who really cares?
— Reprinted from Mystery.File.3, February 1988.
February 6th, 2026 at 12:07 am
Amelia Reynolds Long has her own Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Reynolds_Long
Here’s the first paragraph:
“Amelia Reynolds Long (November 25, 1904 – March 26, 1978) was an American detective fiction writer, novelist, and a pioneer woman writer for the early science fiction magazines of the 1930s.”
The SF magazines that contain her work include WEIRD TALES. Here’s another excerpt from her Wikipedia page::
“In the 1940s, influenced by Agatha Christie, Long turned from science fiction to writing mysteries. Between 1939 and 1952, she published more than 30 murder mystery novels.”
For a brief biography and a list of her mystery novels, go here:
http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7930965/Long,%20Amelia%20Reynolds
Alas, no copies of MURDER TO TYPE could be found offered for sale online at the present time. I wonder if I still have the copy I read and reviewed back in 1988. I just might.
February 6th, 2026 at 7:24 am
I have only read a few short stories and one detective novel by Long and found them to be tough sledding, even her most reprinted tales, “Omega” and “The Thought-Monster.” As a pioneering female science fiction writer she has been compared to C. L. Moore, which to me is a great discredit to Miss Moore. The novel I read was so bad that I have blocked out the title; it featured one of her series characters, Peter Piper; the gimmick being that Peter was female. (How barf-ably cute.) Long disdained the hardboiled school of detective fiction, which is just as well; I shudder to think what she could have produced otherwise. The only book of hers I would be interest in reading is BEHIND THE EVIDENCE, a 1936 collaboration with pioneering science fiction publisher William L. Crawford under the joint pseudonym “Peter Reynolds.” Some sources call Long a highly collectable author, but I must can’t see it.
Again, I must emphasize that I have not read a lot of her work, so my comments my be grossly unfair. I doubt it, but it’s possible.
February 6th, 2026 at 12:51 pm
“Unfair”? No, I don’t think so. At the time she wrote this book, note that it was put out by Phoenix Press, a totally abysmal bottom of the line publisher whose percent rate of readable books was perhaps one in ten, and that one wasn’t really good either.
My knowledge of her early SF and WEIRD TALES type of story is severely limited, so I was happy to read what you had to say about those. I never had much hope they were better than what she wrote in the world of detective fiction, so to have you call them “tough sledding” does not surprise me at all.
February 13th, 2026 at 11:38 am
For those who care, “The Thought-Monster” (Weird Tales, March 1930) was the basis for the fun SF film Fiend without a Face.
February 14th, 2026 at 4:48 am
Phoenix Press should be a two-word review in and of itself in most cases save for a few of Bill Pronzini’s Alternative Classics, and of course alternative is the key word.
In Long’s case that was both her last name and the time it took to shoulder through her pedestrian prose lumbering across the pages to know good end.