by Mary Reed It’s no mystery how much I enjoy mysteries written in the Golden Age. They’re not only entertaining but also also quite instructive. Here then are fourteen things I have learned by reading them: o Characters with grey eyes tend not to be villains o Protagonists have a tendency to marry their second [...] Read More →
Author Archives: mreed
Woman Ironing
by Mary Reed I’m thinking about flat irons, having just been reminded of them by the description of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters public house in Our Mutual Friend.. For, says Dickens, “The back of the establishment, though the chief entrance was there, so contracted that it merely represented in its connection with the front, [...] Read More →
The Game’s Afoot
by Mary Reed If my battered old runners could speak, what footnotes to my history they would reveal. But, as the Christmas cracker joke has it, while they have tongues they cannot speak, and so I shall have to be their interpreter. Every mark on their scuffed once-white surface tells a story. That long smear [...] Read More →
Unlucky Fourteen
by Mary Reed A year or so ago I read J. M. Barrie’s Shall We Join The Ladies? in Black Cap: New Stories of Murder and Mystery, compiled by Lady Cynthia Asquith. Being a fool to myself, I took no notice of the introductory note stating Ladies was the first act of an unfinished play. [...] Read More →
A Christie For Christmas
by Mary Reed In a stroke of marketing genius, it was once common about this time of year to hear the slogan A Christie For Christmas. As a result, Yuletide stockings throughout the land would bulge with the Crime Queen’s latest instalment of murder and mayhem. In the spirit of the season, I offer…. The [...] Read More →
The Ladder at the Window
by Mary Reed Several years ago I read an obituary relating an interesting sequence of events, which had it not been a real life tragedy would make a good basis for a short mystery story. Late in the l890s neighbours realised animals on the farm next door were neglected. Investigating, they went around the back [...] Read More →
Changing a Washer the Hard Way
Last week our neighbour left out his washing machine and the next day it was magically replaced by a new one. Since he wasn’t home at the time, the box containing the washer sat unattended on his porch. Said Eric “He’d be surprised if we took the new washer and left our old washer in [...] Read More →
Pestiferous Posters
By Mary Reed A couple of years ago I scribbled thoughts on pestiferous posters to a certain mystery discussion list. A blog is of course not the same thing as an e-list but that won’t stop me from repeating my plaintive lament, sans the list’s name, and inspired by a certain well-loved Gilbert & Sullivan [...] Read More →
Ethel La Neve: What Did She Know?
By Mary Reed Walter Dew is the only detective who investigated two of the most infamous British murder cases — and in two different centuries at that. The first was the 1888 Ripper case when Dew was beginning his career, and the second was just as notorious. Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was accused of murdering [...] Read More →
When Umbrellas Attack
By Mary Reed A couple of years after the Second World War broke out, the Bishop of Fulham in London was kind enough to share with readers of The Times some advice he had then but lately received from an unnamed official. Apparently the bishop had asked what to do in the event of an [...] Read More →