Vintage Pulp | Dec 11 2009 |
Mignonette Eberhart was an acclaimed mid-century crime writer who was the first to create a female sleuth, which she did in her book The Patient in Room 18. This was a year before Agatha Christie created her immortal sleuth Jane Marple in Murder at the Vicarage. Eberhart soon veered away from pure whodunits and into romance-mysteries that usually centered on good women involved with bad men. The tagline of 1940’s The Hangman’s Whip—“Death is quicker than divorce”—gets that idea across succinctly. It was in these writings that Eberhart flourished, becoming internationally known and highly paid. She authored fifty-nine books, six of which were adapted to film, along with three of her short stories, and in 1971 she earned the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. Eberhart died in 1996, but she changed the romance genre and entertained millions while doing it. Her books—including The Hangman’s Whip—remain widely available.
Vintage Pulp | Mar 27 2009 |
Evocative cover art painted by William Rose for Agatha Christie’s 1948 mystery There Is a Tide, aka Taken at the Flood. Other possible akas include: I Was Only Choking My Dear, All Hands on Neck, and Squish You Were Here. Are we lucky or just good?
Vintage Pulp | Mar 3 2009 |
The novel 4:50 from Paddington, one of Agatha Christie’s beloved Miss Marple mysteries, was published in 1968 and features Miss Jane working in tandem with young Lucy Eylesbarrow to solve the case of…well, you get the gist from the title. We’ve seen several covers for this book, but never one with the subject of the mystery captured in mid-flight. Spoiler alert! She doesn’t survive the landing.
Intl. Notebook | Jan 12 2009 |
British mystery writer Dame Agatha Christie aka Mary Westmacott at her typewriter. It is said that her books have sold more copies than any other publication in history except for the Bible. She died today in 1976.