Locked in a Drawer until the Novels Succeed?! Reviewing "Poirot Investigates!"

It's funny--this book collects fourteen Poirot short stories that were published between 1923 and 1924, which was years after the first Poirot novel came out in 1920. Yet it feels like Christie was still developing Poirot as I read through these.

I wonder if a bunch of Poirot shorts spent a few years in Christie's desk before the success of the novels gave the magazines a better reason to publish them?

Another thing I learned while working on this review was that a lot of these early Poirot stories are actually in the public domain!

Opening Up on Substack

In the interest of spreading the word more effectively, I've opened up a version of this blog on Substack!

If you're already a Substack user, you can follow me and get notes and stuff there!

But I'm going to keep posting here just like usual, so no pressure.

Visit the Substack version

Fun and Cinematic, but with Some Flaws! "Diamonds Are Forever," by Ian Fleming!

One of the things I saw during my last library trip was a few Ian Fleming/James Bond novels! I didn't really have a preference, so of the three they had on the shelf, I picked Diamonds Are Forever. This is the fourth Bond book, published originally in 1956.

I'm not a big Bond fan, but I can't help but recognize the long history of popularity that the James Bond movies have had. I've seen a couple of them a long time ago, Goldeneye and Skyfall, I think, and bits and pieces of a few of the older ones (my dad likes them but also isn't a huge fan).

So I was curious what the books were like! Are they as action-packed as the movies? Are they solid novels or does the cinema help push them into the limelight?

The Critics Lied! Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights" Is Way Different from Machen's "Three Impostors!"

When I did my reading and review of Arthur Machen's Three Impostors a while back, I kept finding critics who said it was too like Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. Well, now I've read the first volume of New Arabian Nights, and I think the critics were really digging when they came up with that one. I'll explain why in a minute.

Smashing Good Comedy with a Big Surprise! Reviewing "My Man Jeeves"

Well, I had a feeling that I wanted to read something a bit more light and fun this week, so I decided to take a look at My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. I've covered Right Ho, Jeeves in the past after I bought a giant Wodehouse collection, and I was surprised to discover that Right Ho is actually the sixth book in the series!

My Man Jeeves is the first book, published in 1919, and collecting stories published from 1911 through 1917, and that's the source of a big surprise, at least for me!

A Strange Coincidence, Three Years Before "The King in Yellow..."

Thanks to the YouTube channel Liminal Spaces for finding this incredible book! His video "Insane Mind-Bending Weird Fiction that Came Out 3 Years Before The King in Yellow" pointed me in the direction of this collection of short stories by Marcel Schwob.

Interestingly, the English translation, by Iain White from 1982, collects stories from four of Schwob's books, but omits many of them! In this post, I'm only considering stories from Schwob's Double Hearts and The King in the Golden Mask, and White actually translated less than half of them!

A Fascinating True Crime Story Born from Obsession!

My first time trying to review a true crime book, let's see how this goes...

Zodiac is a 1986 book by Robert Graysmith, an artist and cartoonist who was a youngster working with the San Francisco Chronicle back in the 1960s when the whole Zodiac murder thing happened. He wasn't part of the Chronicle's investigative team. He got obsessed with the case, and this is the partial story of his investigation into what we know and what he thinks he knows.

Graysmith wasn't just reading reports, either; he got personally involved with interviewing suspects, victims, and law enforcement. He has a number of his own theories.