Lady James wrote this thoughtful and informative book at the request of the librarian of Oxford’s Bodelian Library. Talking about Detective Fiction introduces us to the works of Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins along with Agatha Christie, Marjorie Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and, my favorite, Dorothy Sayers. She offers in detail some of the major contributions each writer has made to the genre of detective fiction. Moving on, she covers the contributions of some of Detective fiction’s seminal American writers, such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet who gave us the hardboiled detectives Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Continue reading →.

When Elizabeth von Arnim (AKA Alice Cholomondeley) published Christine in 1917, an outcry ensued, complainants claiming that the book was loaded with anti-German propaganda. If Von Arnim felt chastened by the perceived slight, she apparently set out to make amends when she wrote Christopher and Columbus. This book was published in 1919, two years after the publication of Christine. The story may also exhibit the yearning the author felt for her daughter, born of English mother and German father, who died in Germany as a teenager. Could she have been salving her grief by recreating that daughter times two? Continue reading →.