With its gentle, quirky characters and period setting, Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Man in Lower Ten is everything a mystery ought to be.
Archive for October, 2009
100 years on, The Man in Lower Ten is still tip-top
Posted in 1909 Bestselling Novels, Mystery, tagged Mary Roberts Rinehart, Pittsburgh, pullman, train on October 28, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Two reviews ahead of 1909 novels
Posted in 1909 Bestselling Novels on October 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I have exhausted my pile of 1919 bestsellers. I meant to get to the state university branch library to use their archives, but life intervened.
I’ll step back 10 years and give you reviews of two novels from the 1909 bestseller list that I found in circulation: The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart [...]
Romance is blight on Desert of Wheat
Posted in 1919 Bestselling Novels, Western on October 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Desert of Wheat is an unsatisfactory romantic novel by the master of westerns, Zane Grey.
Arrow of Gold too heavy to fly
Posted in 1919 Bestselling Novels, Political, Romance, Suspense, tagged Don Carlos de Bourbon, Joseph Conrad, Marseilles, Spain on October 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Readers must pay close attention or read Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold twice to figure out what is happening. Sadly, what’s happening isn’t worth the effort.
War’s Horror Is in the Details
Posted in 1919 Bestselling Novels, Historical, Propaganda, Psychological novel, War, tagged France, Germany, Vicente Blasco Ibanez, World War I on October 7, 2009 | Comments Off
The strength of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibanez
lies in tiny details, like a farmer swerving his plow around mounds that indicate buried corpses.
