Pretty Sinister Books

Antoine Laurain said in a recent interview on the Words with Writers website that he believes “…we need fairy tales not only for children, b...

Horror enthusiasts, whether of the written word or the cinematic variety, may recognize the title I'm about to discuss.  Unless you...

THE STORY: One evening a singer and her piano playing lover have an argument with the singer's composer husband ending in the piano p...

For a book called The Dead Man at the Window (1934: Eng. transl. of Le Mort à la fenêtre, 1933) you would think that the primary focus woul...

Sheer serendipity today! In researching the life and works of Jean Toussaint-Samat, a new to me author whose book The Dead Man at the Wi...

The crime novel plot motif of losing a corpse is often the basis for a black comedy romp. Craig Rice used this gimmick repeatedly in her nov...

I am beginning to sympathize with Julian Symons’ complaints about what he called the humdrum school of detective fiction. At least the Fre...

 Tam Tam Books ed., English translation Currently in its 3rd printing The fantastical world of Boris Vian’s L’Ecume des Jours (1946...

Syndrome E by Franck Thilliez translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti Penguin Books ISBN: 978-0-147-50971-0 370 pp. $16.00 Apr...

True 1st US edition (Henry Holt, 1940) Every now and then a writer not primarily known for his work in crime fiction will try his or her...

 Frontispiece for the US 1st edition  The Secret of Sarek (US edition 1920) is one of LeBlanc’s strangest books in the Arsene Lupin ...

While the first book the French writing team calling themselves Jacquemard-Sénécal wrote was in fact the second book they had published ( ...