Arrow of Gold too heavy to fly

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.

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Escape Is Impossible to Put Down

In the opening scene of Escape, a doctor tells actress Emmy Ritter she’ll be able to walk in a week.
“Just in time for my execution,” she replies.
Ethel Vance  hooked me with that line, and she didn’t let go until I’d read the rest of her novel that evening.
Authorities refuse to allow Emmy’s son, Mark, [...]

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The Postman Still Delivers

James M. Cain’s slender novel The Postman Always Rings Twice is a sordid story of adultery and murder—and it is superb reading. Seventy years after publication, it is as fresh and contemporary as human nature itself.

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Annie Spragg Is Understated Gem

If you can imagine a novel written by Alfred Hitchcock, you’ll understand the fascination of Louis Bromfield’s 1928 bestseller The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg.Bromfield increases the fascination of the story by his squeaky-clean presentation. Readers grasping for clues can’t be sure whether the sordid story they infer is in the material or in their own dirty minds.

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Greene Murder Case Decent Potboiler

The Green Murder Case presents Philo Vance one of his most perplexing mysteries. Two women are shot, one fatally, in a New York mansion where four adult children and one adopted daughter live with their invalid mother, according to the terms of the father’s will.
The police think it was a robbery gone wrong. A brother [...]

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The Mortal Storm Has Gale-Force Power

In The Moral Storm, Phyllis Bottome rejuvenates the tired brother-against-brother theme by putting it into the setting of Nazi Germany. The novel derives its power from the contrast between the loving concern the Nazi boys show to their Jewish stepfather and the self-absorption of their Jewish half-sister. The family is divided by politics, but united by love.

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Mailer War Novel Is Hell

The Naked and the Dead follows an army platoon through the terror and boredom of war. Norman Mailer weaves stories of each man’s background into the story of their part in the victory over the Japanese on Anopopei Island.

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Anatomy of a Murder Is a Keeper

Robert Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder is courtroom drama at its best.

Lieutenant Frederic Manion shot Barney Quill to death in front of a room full of witnesses in Quill’s hotel bar before turning himself in. Manion says Quill had raped his wife. The only legal defense open to Manion is insanity.

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Quick and Quirky Novella Has Cinematic Appeal

James Hilton’s We Are Not Alone is so British and so visual that reading it is like watching Masterpiece Theatre in your mind.

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Nothing So-So about And So—Victoria

In AND SO—VICTORIA, Vaughan Wilkins packs more “I’ll go to bed after the next chapter” between two covers than a half dozen Gone with the Winds. Wilkins weaves together history, mystery, romance, murder, thrills, and suspense—and he handles each thread deftly.

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