[NightBird]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

Well .... there goes my credit card bill for October - I love these older British mysteries & novels.

Lol. I love discovering these interesting authors I missed before. However, after reading some of the descriptions I was able to whittle down my wishlist. Three of the Croft-Cooke books are autobiographies.

I am notifying Amazon of all the lower prices at B&N so I hope they price match.

So far I'm most impressed with Ognall. I got The Bowman Touch under the Hartley Howard pseudonym, but I sampled the others and they all look good. Very stylish, noirish writing.

Product Description
The girl in the black velvet gown looked to be very drunk - she also looked to be in plenty of trouble…

Bowman liked neither her type of escort nor the way she was being manhandled into the sedan parked outside Morry's Bar. He liked even less the smack on the jaw he got when he intervened.

This is the start of a new, high-pressure adventure with a tremendous climax. The Bowman Touch has all the streamlined pace and suspense to be expected from that master of the modern thriller - Hartley Howard.

Complete list of Bloomsbury Reader titles at Amazon

Originally Posted by Mike L

Looks very interesting, NightBird. Thanks for posting it.

I see one of the writers is Edmund Crispin. It's funny, but up to a couple of days ago I had never head of him, and now his name has come up twice.

He was mentioned in the play on BBC Radio this week, Strangers on a Film (should still be on BBC iPlayer), which was an imagined conversation between Raymond Chandler and Alfred Hitchcock, about their attempted collaboration on the screenplay of Hitchcock version of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train.

It seems Crispin wrote a story which inspired the climax of the film, the scene where Bruno and Guy are fighting on an out-of-control carousel (merry-go-round).

I made a note to see if any of his books are available as ebooks. Bloomsbury must heard me.

Oh interesting about Crispin. I saw the movie and I remember that scene. (I also read the book). Too bad they don't have any of his yet.

From the Wikipedia article about him:

Montgomery wrote nine detective novels and two collections of short stories under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin (taken from a character in Michael Innes's Hamlet, Revenge![3]). The stories feature Oxford don Gervase Fen,[4] who is a Professor of English at the university and a fellow of St Christopher's College, a fictional institution that Crispin locates next to St John's College. Fen is an eccentric, sometimes absent-minded, character reportedly based on the Oxford professor W. E. Moore. The whodunit novels have complex plots and fantastic, somewhat unbelievable solutions, including examples of the locked room mystery. They are written in a humorous, literary and sometimes farcical style and contain frequent references to English literature, poetry, and music. They are also among the few mystery novels to break the fourth wall occasionally and speak directly to the audience. Perhaps the best example is from The Moving Toyshop, during a chase sequence -- "Let's go left", Cadogan suggested. "After all, Gollancz is publishing this book."[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Crispin