by Julian Symons & edited by John Cooper ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2006
Powerful evidence that Symons’s notorious attack on the detective story overlooked some of his own most clever contributions.
Forty-two snippets of detective craft from the genre’s most famous apostate.
Long before he came to disavow the detective story as a childish precursor to the crime novel, Symons (1912–94) produced a dizzying volume of short puzzles featuring solid, low-key private detective Francis Quarles for the London Evening Standard between 1950 and 1955. This volume gathers nearly all of them—miniatures from three to eight pages long—and quite a box of bonbons they are. Though none rise to the level of their novel-length counterparts, from The Thirty-First of February (1950) through The Narrowing Circle (1954), they’re all enjoyable and professional. The slightest of them, like “Red Rum Means Murder,” “A Present from Santa Claus,” “Murder in Reverse” and “Final Night Extra,” turn on a single clue or discrepancy reminiscent of the contemporaneous stories Ellery Queen would collect in Q.B.I. (1955). But Symons can weave unusually complex webs in a short space, and “The Barton Hall Dwarf” (a tart echo of a famous G.K. Chesterton story) and “The Vanishing Trick” would do any puzzler proud. Symons’s mastery of varied approaches and tones expertly disguises the fact that three of the most ingenious entries—“A Man with Blue Hair,” “Ghost from the Past,” and “The Whistling Man”—are basically the same tale, but with different trimmings.
Powerful evidence that Symons’s notorious attack on the detective story overlooked some of his own most clever contributions.Pub Date: April 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-932009-44-2
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Crippen & Landru
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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