I’m a fan of film noir. For my money, it doesn’t get much better than Fred MacMurray “Hey, Baby”-ing Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Humphrey Bogart talking tough in The Maltese Falcon. But even though I’m a fan of the detective film and I love to read, I had yet to pick up anything by Dashiell Hammett, the master of the hard-boiled detective novel. Time to remedy that, I decided. The Maltese Falcon is the story of archetypal detective Sam Spade who, along with […]
2 for 1: Harry Potter and the Cuckoo’s Calling and Harry Potter and the Silkworm
The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm are the first two entries in a new detective series featuring Cormoran Strike and written by much-beloved J.K. Rowling (her pseudonym should hopefully not be a spoiler, as it has been well-publicized and Rowling has been interviewed as Galbraith by now). Strike is a veteran and an amputee, struggling to turn a profit as a private detective in The Cuckoo’s Calling when he is approached to investigate the death of a famous model Lula Landry. Strike is accompanied by […]
The City & The City
Quick Synopsis: A murder occurs in a fractured town, resulting in more questions than answers Quick Review: A very interesting blend of science fiction and detective procedural Read the full review here
Yup, another review of The Cuckoo’s Calling
If I counted correctly, I’m the sixth Cannonballer to pick up The Cuckoo’s Calling, so you’re probably already familiar with the summary: injured war veteran and private detective Cormoran Strike, down on his luck and down to his last pence; his new girl Friday, Robin, newly engaged and enthralled with the prospect of working with a real live detective; a celebrity suicice–OR IS IT?–and a bunch of usual suspects, all with a conceivable motive and a suspicious air about them. None of the individual characters were […]
Where is the girl,
Where is the girl, who by the boatman’s door, Above the locks, above the boating throng, Unmoor’d our skiff when through the Wytham flats, Red loosestrife and blond meadow-sweet among And darting swallows and light water-gnats, We track’d the shy Thames shore? (From Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1865) , set around Oxford.) More detective fiction! But this time it’s actually from the interwar period–the Golden Age–rather than just being set there. An all-female Oxford college, full of clever, high-spirited girls with enough time […]
JK Rowling Launches an Adult Mystery Series
This “debut novel” by Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling) is an enjoyable who-dun-it with a complex hero by the name of Cormoran Strike. A former soldier-turned-P.I., Strike is the bastard son of a rock star and one of his drug-addled groupies, and is long accustomed to surviving on his own. Since losing a leg in Afghanistan and mustering out, Strike has suffered the end of a doomed relationship with a beautiful but broken woman, no money, no new cases to solve, and regular death threats from […]
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