LEFT INSIDE (again!): Mystery Writer Autographs

While I was sorting books and replacing books I've read back on shelves I was reminded that three books I recently bought were signed. In two cases this was not mentioned in the description when I bought the books and it was quite a surprise when I opened them. So I thought I'd go through the few books I know are signed by the author, take photos and share them with the world.  Enjoy!

 

John V. Turner also wrote as "Nicholas Brady" and "David Hume." This is rather rare signature. The book came from a stash of books and memorabilia from the home of one of Turner's relatives. The bookseller sent me an intriguing email explaining that in the box of books he purchased there were some old videotapes and one of them apparently showed Turner at his 90th birthday party surrounded by relatives singing "Happy Birthday."

 

This is in my copy of Concrete Kimono by John Paddy Carstairs. This inscription is in gigantic bold handwriting and takes up the entire free endpaper.  Carstairs was a movie and television show director, a painter and novelist best known for his humorous fiction rather than his handful of crime and adventure thrillers. His detective is Garway Trenton a scriptwriter who stumbles into ludicrous crimes with the ease of a klutz slipping on a banana peel. And we're supposed to find the books as funny as such trite pratfalls. I think Carstairs did not mean to be self-deprecating in this inscription but was actually telling the truth -- the books are indeed loaded with nonsense.

Eileen Helen Clements is the author of a series of crime and espionage novels featuring her series character Alistair Woodhead. I reviewed Cherry Harvest earlier this year. Two more reviews of her books are planned for later this year.

Joan Cockin is the pseudonym of Joan Burbidge Macintosh, PhD, CBE, one of the first women to work in British diplomatic service during World War Two.  Her excellent mystery novel Villainy at Vespers, so deserving of being reprinted, was reviewed here February 2020.  I'll be reading the book above and reviewing it in June.

Edwy Searles Brooks is better known by his alter egos "Berkeley Gray" and his Norman Conquest adventure novels as well as "Victor Gunn" in which Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell solves baffling murders many of which are impossible crimes or have Gothic or macabre content.

This one was one of the surprises.  I was reading The Opera Murders by Kirby Williams a few months ago and was curious about the real name of Kirby Williams which I knew was a pseudonym. I had nearly forgotten I owned a copy of The CVC Murders, the first Williams mystery. When I dragged it out of the dusty box in which it was buried I opened it to find this revelation.  The name Kirby Williams was the pen name of Irving Ramsdell.  A simple Google search uncovered Ramsdell's obituary and I learned he went by the name Kirby and not Irving, among many other bits of trivia.  More on Ramsdell and his two collaborators and their two murder mysteries very much modeled on the Van Dine School is coming soon.

 

Aloha Nui Oe! Max Freedom Long wrote three detective novels featuring Komako Koa, a plantation policeman in Hawaii.  I've written about The Lava Murders, Long's second mystery, at Mystery*File website.  This signature appears in my copy of his third novel Death Goes Native, a book I still haven't read. Maybe I'll finally get to it this summer.