#crimeclassics

Lizzie Hayes on the prolific John Creasey

“ Creasey was a remarkably prolific writer and, over his forty-year career as a published writer, wrote  the incredible total of 562 full-length novels (that's over 14 a year.) He knew that it would be folly to flood the market with a new John Creasey every 27 days and so he wrote under a grand total of 28 different pseudonyms. Creasey wrote between 7,000 and 10,000 words a day and claimed that he could write a book in two weeks and still have half a day free to play cricket. He also once suggested he could be shut up in a glass box and left there to write a whole book. In the 1930s and 1940s Creasey also wrote Westerns under the pseudonyms William K. Reilly, Tex Riley and Ken Ranger. Initially Creasey's knowledge of America came from books and films but later he visited the US and made a second home in Arizona. His third wife, Jeanne Williams, was American and wrote historical western novels.”  Read more: http://promotingcrime.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/detectives-of-golden-age-john-creasey.html

“It was a funny twisting and turning of expectations, this novel. I'm familiar with Allingham from her later work - The Tiger in the Smoke and Hide My Eyes - both London novels, both thrillers rather than mysteries. This early venture begins with much more conventional murder mystery set-up, albeit with some humdinger prose and crackling dialogue. Then, as soon as you think it's going to be a mystery, everything comes out - it becomes a siege novel, a sort of nightmare. That's where I think it became indisputably Allingham - that sense of a real situation made uncanny by the force of a personality that is, to some degree, unhinged. “

Death in Green Bands ... The Crime at Black Dudley, by Margery Allingham  - http://leaf-pile.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/death-in-green-bands-crime-at-black.html

Brand new website for George Bellairs over here

The wonderful @jacquiwine on Eric Ambler’s  The Light of Day

“The novel is narrated by Arthur Abdel Simpson, a small-time thief who makes a living by hustling tourists on their arrival at Athens airport. As the story opens, Simpson is recounting the tale of how he got mixed up with Harper, a man who turned out to be more dangerous than he appeared at first sight. As Simpson looks back on past events, here’s how his story begins:

‘It came down to this: if I had not been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police. I had no choice but to do as this man Harper told me. He was entirely responsible for what happened to me.

I thought he was an American. He looked like an American – tall with the loose, light suit, the narrow tie and button-down collar, the smooth, old-young, young-old face and the crew cut. He spoke like an American, too; or at least like a German who had lived in America for a long time. Of course, I now know that he is not an American, but he certainly gave that impression. His luggage, for instance, was definitely American: plastic leather and imitation gold locks. I know American luggage when I see it. (pg. 1)’

It’s a good opening, one that pulled me into narrative – you know from the start that something bad has happened to the narrator, and he holds Harper responsible for it.”

Read more - https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2015/09/15/topkapi-the-light-of-day-by-eric-ambler/