Tag Archives: Lawrence Block

I’m All-in On eBooks

I was raised by a book-loving dad who passed on to me both the love of reading and the love of books. (He also passed on a love of maps, but that’s a story for another post.)

One of my dad’s lifelong goals was to publish books, and by a round-about path he ultimately accomplished that goal. As an old TV commercial has it, “And I got to help!” He began with a printshop that eventually grew to a (very, very) small boutique book publishing shop. We did maybe half-a-dozen books.

So, a love and respect for books has long been with me.

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Catherine Aird

It has been just over six months since my last Mystery Monday post. It’s not that I haven’t been reading mystery novels (my second-favorite genre) but that I just haven’t been moved to write a post (a bit of a general problem the last year or so).

But I haven’t been idle, quite to the contrary. I’ve now gone through the other three (of the five) character series by Lawrence Block (Keller the Killer, Chip Harrison, and Evan Tanner). Prolific writer, Block.

And I’ve read nearly all of the Sloan and Crosby murder mysteries (also known as the Chronicles of Calleshire) by yet another British writer, Catherine Aird.

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Mystery Monday 9/4/23

A late edition Mystery Monday post because I’ve been distracted by various and sundry. I’ve meant this for more than one previous Monday. Not gonna miss another.

Having pretty thoroughly explored the British Queens of Crime as well as (the American) Ellery Queen, I’ve turned to new pastures: the Butch Karp / Marlene Ciampi stories by Robert K. Tanenbaum and the Matthew Scudder stories by Lawrence Block. And French author Maurice Lablanc!

Plus, I’m disgruntled by Dark Winds, an AMC TV series that (too loosely, IMO) adapts two novels from the Navajo Tribal Police series by Tony Hillerman.

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Secret Code II

‘X’ is for… ??

I’ve written about secret codes before. The Pigpen cipher was pretty simplistic, almost more a child’s game, but the Playfair cipher was a bit more interesting. That one came from a murder mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. Today I thought I’d show you another simple code from another mystery novel.

1829 2125 0038 2226 1600 2125 0027 1722 4200 1829 1600 4219 2518 1617 1900 4122 3916 3200 3700 4019 0025 2016 0028 1724 2718 2241 4400 2118 0020 2516 2500 1829 1600 1819 2316 1517 2118 1617 0038 2226 1643 0015 2921 3829 0030 2025 1800 2425 2521 2841 2500 4120 4240 1617 2500 1822 0018 2916 0031 1619

Stop! See if you can decode the above before continuing.

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