Book review – detective fiction
Philip Marlowe’s last case? Only to Sleep, by Lawrence Osborne, reviewed
Only to Sleep is the third Philip Marlowe novel written by someone other than Raymond Chandler and while the authors…
Corpses, clues and Kiwis in Ngaio Marsh’s posthumous novel
Publishing loves a brand. Few authors of fiction create characters who reach this semi-divine status, but when they do, even…
Addicted to trouble
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual…
A Latin American shaggy-dog story
If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the…
Under cover in the underworld
W.H. Auden was addicted to detective fiction. In his 1948 essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, he analysed the craving, which he…
Bark and no bite
With so much Nordic noir around, it’s a relief to return to the granddaddy of them all, the hard-boiled private…
