Pretty Sinister Books

THE STORY   Elmer Bliss, reporter, is hired by a mysterious gentleman called Philander Summerfield to look into a recent Peter Somhers murde...

These bits of ephemera are rather remarkable for both being well over 100 years old. Both post card and newspaper story were Left Inside  my...

There will always be Sherlock Holmes pastiches.  It is the one type of mystery novel homage that seems to be pouring out of an eternal fount...

A dead body in a locked room, a house surrounded by undisturbed snow, all suspects have an alibi but one and yet it seems that one person co...

THE STORY: A riddle in rhyme and a complicated alpha-numeric code are the key to a hidden treasure that lifelong criminal Sam Trout has l...

In lieu of Friday's Forgotten Books this week I have a guest post by blogger, mystery novelist, genre historian and friend, Martin Edw...

Fog matters to you and me, but it can't touch Sherlock Holmes This song has been covered a couple times by other minor indie rock grou...

Whodunit? Who stole my baby? Everyone in the room looks shady ...It's a bedside mystery! Ah, the disco era! Platforms shoes, bell b...

A new feature every Saturday for a couple of weeks, gang. I'm calling this "Covering Their Tracks" since it has a perfect dual...

In his own words David Arquette admitted that he is an odd choice for Sherlock Holmes, but for me the entire conceit of this uneven produc...

Original PBO (Warner Books, 1976) Part of the fun of Rich Westwood's Crime of the Century meme at the Past Offences blog is looking...

Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Jeremy Brett, George C Scott, Stewart Granger, Rupert Everett, and Benedict Cumberbatch have all played the...

Now that Ian McKellan is entrancing moviegoers with his performance as the retired apiarist Sherlock Holmes all I can think of is bees. An...

Below are the answers to the Literary IQ quiz "Children in Sherlock Holmes Stories"posted a few days ago. According to the rul...

While researching an obscure book and the opinions it received at the time of its original publication I serendipitously discovered the foll...

Here’s a great example of not judging a book by its title. Turns out The Kentish Manor Murders (1988) is not at all a country house detecti...

Lilly Library (photo by "Vmenkov") While researching Victor L. Whitechurch, whose books I am currently reading, I came across ...