Wednesday, December 24, 2025

The Jackie and Laurie Show Video: Elijah Invented Congee (#521)

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Saturday, December 20, 2025

FRIDAY''S "FORGOTTEN" BOOKS: the links to the reviews and more: October 2025

Patti Abbott: The Damned by Andrew Pyper

Yvette Banek: The Christopher St. John Sprigg Collection, Illustrated: The Perfect Alibi, Fatality in Fleet Street, Death of a Queen, Crime in Kensington, Death of an Airman (an e-book omnibus) by Christopher St. John Sprigg (Yvette suggests you ignore the public domain "illustrations" in this edition.) Kate Jackson on Sprigg's novels.







Curtis Evans: On Philip MacDonald (Blogspot ads are a bit much...don't click on them, vs. around them, unless you want to see more ads...); Bodies from the Library 4 edited by Tony Medawar





Tracy K: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (for Neeru's "Hundred Years Hence" blog project, reviewing 1925 books this year)(and another utterly un-0bscure book, to be sure)





B. D. McClay: Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller

Neeru: The Murder of the Mahatma by G.D. Khosla

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Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: book received: THE LOST COAST AND OTHER SHARON McCONE STORIES by Marcia Muller (Stark House Press, January 2026)


In Wednesday's mail is a book I hope I don't have to persuade you to snap up, or at least take a look at--Marcia Muller's selections of what she considers her best stories about her most popular series character, detective McCone, who is featured in a long string of novels, beginning with Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977, and, as Muller notes, had her short-fiction debut about a decade later. After an impressive string of retrospective collections from her husband and frequent collaborator Bill Pronzini, the McCone stories selection is also more than welcome. 

Muller's McCone is one of the earliest pragmatic female private investigator series, notably preceding in publication the first Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski and Sara Grafton's Kinsey Milhone volumes, and loses nothing by not including much that is stereotypical or fanciful, as opposed to McCone using her wits and courage to get through the hardest parts of her job, working with a cooperative private detection agency, All Souls (and a number of times working with the "Nameless Detective", the most populous series of  'tec' fiction from Pronzini; they also have collaborated on a historical PI mystery series, the Carpenter and Quincannon stories, while also writing stories about their respective PIs on their own).

I started reading the McCone novels with the rather brilliant Trophies and Dead Things (1990), in part a farewell to the late '60s in largely youthful progressive and radical political subcultures, and those who were hangers-on, and a look at those still or newly working for the better aspects of society, and dealing with those who would exploit their "marks" in those interacting communities. 

I've read some of the stories collected here, and others are new to me...I will be digging in here, along with the delayed reads of the recent Pronzini retrospectives.

Greg Shepard's Stark House is doing very good work with these. Muller's preface is a very welcome account of how she fleshed out McCone's life and experience, many other times hewing closely to some of the other most remarkable events in San Francisco and its environs (and the larger world).  More thorough review coming when I get a chance to get it down on screen...

The Lost Coast and Other Sharon McCone Stories by Marcia Muller (Stark House, 2026, 260 pp, $15.95 trade paperback: ISBN 979-8-88601-176-0)

7 * Preface * Marcia Muller (all stories by Muller)

10 * Deceptions * from A Matter of Crime #1 (HBJ 1981)

28 * All the Lonely People * Sisters in Crime (1989)

40 * The Land that Time Forgot * Sisters in Crime #2 (1990)

54 * Somewhere in the City * The Armchair Detective * 1990

69 * Silent Night * Mistletoe Mysteries (1990)

82 * Benny's Space * A Woman's Eye (1992)

98 * The Lost Coast * Deadly Allies (1992)

117 * The Holes in the System * Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine  June 1996

136  * "Knives at Midnight" * Guilty as Charged (1996)

155 * Up at the Riverside * Irreconcilable Differences (1999)

 170 * Irrefutable Evidence * Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine November 2005

185 * Telegraphing * Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine June 2009

196 * Tell Me Who I Am * (a short e-book) Grand Central Publishing (2016)

212 * April 13 * Deadly Anniversaries (2020)

227 * Scamming the Scammer * Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers (2024)

239 * The McCone Files * The McCone Files (as "The Last Open File" and "File Closed") (1995)

258 * Marcia Muller Bibliography (apparently by Muller) (2026)

[More to come]

Bowling Green State University's Browne Popular Culture Library finding guide for Muller's papers.

TM

See Patti Abbott's blog for more Short Story Wednesday (more complete!) reviews for this week.

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Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: short stories from THE SUN magazine: August 2024: "Clean Breaks" by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum; May 2025: "The Healer" by Rob Keast. THE SUN, edited by Rob Bowers

Links to the online texts from The Sun, which will allow two free accesses before asking for subscription money (subs can be print and online, or online only, for the same price):

"Clean Breaks" by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (my review of her first collection, This Life She's Chosen) Lunstrum's website

Lunstrum's story is about a woman not quite adrift, but unsure of her destination, as she takes a small boat up and down the coast of the northwestern contiguous U. S. and southwestern Canada, who finds herself helping a man and his daughter in distress in another craft. He's been sold some watered-down diesel by shady dealers, and, worse, his young daughter is suffering from a raging fever. As a nurse who's taking a sort of sabbatical, she reflects on this in comparison with her own situation with her daughter, going years back, as she diagnoses and tries to stabilize the young girl.

It's a meditative story, even given the urgency of the crises before them...and those in the past. This story seems more informed by life experience than those in her first collection, and is worth the read.


"The Healer" by Rob Keast (improbably, there are at least three Rob Keasts going by that version of their first name in some sort of public life on the web, at least, but this Rob Keast does have this essay online from Writer's Digest)

The only story in this later issue is a vignette, albeit just long enough to be long for a vignette...another meditative work (The Sun does gravitate in that direction), in which a young man, teaching conversational/business English in Japan, hopes that certain rituals he engages in help a close college friend and his mother, who have some health crises back home. He's not so very sure that anything he does has any effect, but engages in the mildly ritualistic behavior, riding his local subway circuit with a kind of Shinto (I think that, rather than Buddhist) talisman, in hopes of somehow lending or engendering what amounts to good karma for his loved ones. It's a reasonable portrait of what we do when we can do little, if anything, else, in the face of peril to others...more, whether one realizes it or not, to soothe ourselves and with the wan but desperate hope we can make a difference thus. The first story I've read by Keast, and solid work, with some wit added to the protagonist's perplexity.


For more, and much more prompt, examples of Weds. Short Stories this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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Thursday, October 2, 2025

Saturday Music Club (On Thursday): 2 October 2025

 Diane Monroe: "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"

Brian Arnold: Carole King: "Will You Still Love Me, Tomorrow?" (Live on BBC TV, 1971)

Jim Cameron: David "Fathead" Newman: "Davey Blue"

Jeff Gemmil: Alexandra King: Across the Pond; Tasmin Archer: Vibration

Michael A. Gonzalez: "I Want You Back: On First Love and Michael Jackson"

Jerry House: Hymn Time: Elizabeth Cotten and Guy Penrod (separately) "In the Sweet By and By"; Hank Williams, Sr.: "The Old Country Church"; Alison Krauss and Yo-Yo Ma: "Simple Gifts"

George Kelley: Better Broken by Sarah McLachlan; 
and Remembering Now by Van Morrison        
from Better Broken by Sarah McLachlan:
 

April Landrum: Indirect Satisfaction (Strange Mono, an all profits for charity label), a four-way split album between bands Assisted Living, Bruise Bath, Droopies and Tlooth (2 songs each). (One of these bands, Bruise Bath, features a cousin, one gen removed, of Diane Monroe, above. Music can run in families.)






Vintage Obscura Radio: a web radio station devoted to a wide variety of obscure music and with a busy BlueSky presence/archive. Their 2020 Hallowe'en playlist.
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Wednesday, October 1, 2025

SSW: June 1943: UNKNOWN WORLDS;; July 1943: WEIRD TALES, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, SCIENCE FICTION (previously FUTURE FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION); September 1943: FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES--stories from 1943 US fantasy fiction magazines:

A snapshot/slice of a time long past...notable that the most famous story in this issue of Weird Tales would be the most famous and among the most influential stories to be published in any of the issues cited here, one which posits that "Jack the Ripper" has found a means of achieving literal immortality through his crimes. Got a top-line banner, though not the cover illustration (albeit, to be fair, the story is not so very much Newsstand Illustration-friendly for the times). 





The most famous story here, I'd say, is the Wellman. I've certainly seen it collected and anthologized the most. Though the Sturgeon is probably a not too distant second...

This issue can be read here.  ISFDB index here. (Bloch's light-hearted, pun-laden "Lefty Feep"-series story might well be the best-remembered story in this issue.)


This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Catherine L. Moore story would be the best remembered of the new fiction in this issue...even if by default. Chambers has had a spike in interest in part from television taking elements from his fiction and/or name-checking it in such series as True Detective, From, and Good Omens, the last in its turn based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Alan Moore which also pays homage to Chambers, and apparently also Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which I have yet to see.


This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Bloch story is (just barely) the most widely-reprinted here.

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Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: links to the reviews, et al. 26 September 2025

Patricia Abbott: Morningstar: Growing Up with Books by Ann Hood

Brad Bigelow: Bad Girl by Viña Delmar

Brian Busby: recent vintage Canadian lit reviews

Colman/Olman: A Chill Rain in January by L.R. Wright; Barking Dogs by Terence M. Green



This issue can be read at this link.

Tony Davis: Dorothy McIllwraith, editor of Short Stories and Weird Tales magazines

Martin Edwards: Words for Murder, Perhaps by "Edward Candy" (Barbara Neville); Dead Men at the Folly by John Rhode; Murder Squad

Eric: Missing in Action by William J. Linn; the short fiction of Charles Boeckman


Will Errickson: Such Nice People by Sandra Scoppetone; The Happy Man by Eric C. Higgs; The Farm by Richard Haigh: the final volumes of the Paperbacks from Hell reissue series

Curtis Evans: The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle

Paul Fraser: Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1943, edited by Robert W. Lowndes

Ted Gioia on David Foster Wallace and his more accessible work

Michael Gonzales: the prose and film-scripting of Eleanor Perry; The 1980s NYC Bookstore: Supper at Scribner's

Brea Grant and Mallory O’Meara: The Most Underrated Books of the Year

Aubrey Nye Hamilton: Pattern for Murder by Ione Sandberg Shriner (nee Elaine Mathilda Sandberg)

Bev Hankins: The Nine Waxed Faces by "Francis Beeding" (John Leslie Palmer & Hilary St. George Saunders)

 

Lisa Hill: Short Story September 2025

Lesa Holstine: "The Hunter" by Tim Sullivan (a DS Cross short story); Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner 

Rich Horton: Changelog: Collected Fiction by Rich Larson; Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

Jerry House: Black Creek Crossing by John Saul

Kate Jackson: Death in Ambush by "Susan Gilruth" (Susannah Margaret Hornsby-Wright); The Whisper in the Gloom by Nicholas Blake; The Immaterial Murder Case by Julian Symons; Death at Deepwood Grange by Michael Underwood 

George Kelley: Yalum by Matthew Hughes

Stephen King on Daphne du Maurier

Karen Langley: No Such Thing as a Free Lunch by Rosalind Brackenbury; Look at Me by Anita Brookner; Looking After Your Books by Francesca Galligan

Joe Kenney: Raga 6 by Frank Lauria

B. V. Lawson: Murderous Schemes edited by J. Madison Davis and Donald E. Westlake

Steve Lewis: Orbit 3 edited by Damon Knight ("Joachim Boaz", as well.)

Todd Mason: 2021 best horror fiction of the year annuals anthologies

Neeru: A Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge

James Nicoll: Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack; Bound Feet by Kelsea Yu

J. F. Norris: Now Seek My Bones by S, H, Courtier

Jim Noy: Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand

James Reasoner: Climb a Broken Ladder by Robert Novak; Shield for Murder by William P. McGivern; Montana Fury by "Al Cody" (Archie Joscelyn), Lariat Story Magazine, May 1927; Detective Action Stories, October 1936; The Sandhills Shootings by "Chap O'Keefe" (Keith Chapman); Jebediah Smith by Alfred Wallon

Gerard Saylor: I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Mannie Murphy

Steven H. Silver: The Graveyard Heart by Roger Zelazny and Elegy for Angels and Dogs by Walter Jon Williams (Tor Double #24) 

Gay Talese and Edward Sorel, with Mark Rozzo: "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", Esquire, April 1966, edited by Harold Hayes

Kevin Tipple: Within Plain Sight by Bruce Robert Coffin

Bill Wallace: Weird Tales, October 1939, edited by Farnsworth Wright

...

Clarissa Brincat: Novels with a certain structure are more likely to be classics

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Monday, September 29, 2025

2021: Best of the Year horror fiction annual volumes in English: as edited by Ellen Datlow, Stephen Jones, Paula Guran, and Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax: "Forgotten" Books

In 2021, we had four "best of the year" horror-fiction annuals (that I'm aware of) published in English, as a few others had, sadly, ceased in just previous years. And this quartet included two that were also to be the last volumes published in their respective series, the Stephen Jones, and Hardcore Horror...Ellen Datlow offers the 13th volume of her second (first solo) series, while Jones's was his 31st volume (the first few in collaboration with Ramsey Campbell, as Datlow's first annual series was in tandem with Terri Windling, then with Kelly Link and Gavin Grant). I enjoy the mirroring in the numbers there; Guran's is her second with Pyr, after her former annual's publisher hit hard times, and this would be the sixth and last from Mullenax and Chandler. UK- and Australian/New Zealander-specific horror annuals, and the notably "line-crossing" Weird Fiction annual, had folded in the previous several years.

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Thirteen, ed. Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books, November 16, 2021, 978-1-949102-60-4, $15.99, xlvi+383pp, trade pb, annual, cover by Reiko Murakami)





Stury reviews forthcoming...it's been a busy weekend.
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