Nicks` Cabinet of Curios

  V J Banis - The Mystery of Bloodstone  - Linford Mystery Library - Date uncertain V J Banis is best remembered as a writer on gay issues but had an interesting sideline as the author of a number of gothic novels.  These sounded tremendous fun so I enlisted the help of my local library service to give one a try.   One of his works involved a man who finds a skeleton with a stake where its' heart used to be.  That sounded intriguing but unfortunately Derbyshire Library Service were unable to provide a copy.  Undaunted, I opted for this one.  The plot sounded promising enough, involving a young woman who feels compelled to revisit Bloodstone Manor, the house in which she grew up, which overlooks a village named Skull Point.  Accordingly, she sets sail during a raging storm (not just an ordinary storm) accompanied by a servant who is soon found spending her nights attempting to make contact with the deceased.   Promising enough, and o...

  George Bellairs  - A Surfeit of Suspects - Charnwood  - 2022 2022 reprint of book first published in 1964 George Bellairs was a pseudonym used by Harold Blundell (1902-1982) Harold Blundell aka George Bellairs was never a professional writer despite having 58 novels and a number of articles published. Instead he stayed in his post as bank manager in Rochdale and pursued writing as a paying hobby.   It's often said that many writers of classic detective fiction treated their stories as a kind of puzzle to be solved, and often seemed set in a kind of hermetically-sealed bubble, divorced from most people's reality.  This story is nothing like that, with much of the plot centring around  a joinery business in the fictitious manufacturing town of Evingdon which has been hovering on the brink of bankruptcy for some time.   The author makes great play of the contrast between the expanding new town and the less salubrious old town with it's inadequately...

Leonard Gribble  - Notorious Crimes - Guild Publishing  - 1985 Leonard Gribble was an author and editor who wrote under a number of names, including Leo Grex and Bruce Sanders.  This true crime collection features lucid and readable accounts of a dozen cases, many of them I suspect largely forgotten now.   The book held my attention throughout and I would happily read another similar volume.   There are a number of minor errors, generally unimportant in themselves but notable for their frequency.  Generally these are just grammatical errors.  One more perplexing error comes in Chapter 6, 'One Way Ride in Essex'. In this case it is explained that, under interrogation, a suspect was unable to write out an address another man had previously given him, presumably some days earlier. The author states that "the inference was very clear to the police" , but it is not so clear to the reader. Given that the suspect was American, the address, that of t...

  J S Fletcher - The Lost Mr Linthwaite I am a big fan of J S Fletcher but I must admit The Lost Mr Linthwaite is not destined to become a personal favourite. The plot of the story is actually pretty good, but somehow neither the characters or the location really come to life in this one.    Very often, I encounter books/short stories from the `20s, or indeed from later eras, where there is no real need for much character development/background and/or too much description of locations. I`m thinking here of the works of E Phillips Oppenheim or some of the Sexton Blake Library stories.  In my personal opinion, this story really could have done with some of those things to give it a bit of zing. As it is, JSF has written a quite agreeable story but not a gripping one. I would mention that my download of this (see picture) has a number of typos. They didn`t really bother me, but I do notice that Black Heath Crime have re-issued it recently and their version might be a be...