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| Baroness Orczy, from the May 26, 1906 San Francisco Call |
Showing posts with label Beverley Nichols. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beverley Nichols. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Jan 31 app deadline, UT-Austin Ransom Center.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Erle Stanley Gardner's correspondence with Nathan Leopold.
On the blog American Fiction Notes, Mark Athitakis discusses the correspondence of author-lawyer Erle Stanley Gardner with convicted murderer Nathan Leopold (of Leopold and Loeb infamy). A few more details can be gleaned here from UT-Austin's Ransom Center; other mystery writers mentioned on this page include Rupert Croft-Cooke (aka Leo Bruce) and Beverley Nichols.
(Hat tip to the Guardian books blog)
(Hat tip to the Guardian books blog)
Friday, November 16, 2007
Beverley Nichols, continued.
I blogged earlier about Beverley Nichols's The Moonflower Murder (1955). I recently finished Nichols's Murder by Request (1960), in which financier Sir Owen Kent enlists sleuth Horatio Green when he receives anonymous letters and phone calls stating that he will die within the week. Green accompanies Sir Owen to a health resort owned by Sir Owen's sister and fanatical brother-in-law, and, as prophesied, Sir Owen is shot amid a roomful of people, many of whom have excellent reasons for wanting him dead.
The pudgy Green's doleful contemplation of his allotted glass of carrot juice and subsequent sneaking out for a steak will strike a sympathetic chord with any dieting reader. The tabloid account of the murder, ladled with gloriously overwrought prose ("It happened last night, at nine o'clock precisely. That hour will be forever graven on the tablets of memory"), suggests that Nichols was poking fun at Fleet Street, as he worked as a journalist during his career. The novel has some neat twists, sober wrestling by Green over ethical dilemmas (e.g., would the revelation of the murderer harm more people than it would help), and terrific writing such as the following:
I blogged earlier about Beverley Nichols's The Moonflower Murder (1955). I recently finished Nichols's Murder by Request (1960), in which financier Sir Owen Kent enlists sleuth Horatio Green when he receives anonymous letters and phone calls stating that he will die within the week. Green accompanies Sir Owen to a health resort owned by Sir Owen's sister and fanatical brother-in-law, and, as prophesied, Sir Owen is shot amid a roomful of people, many of whom have excellent reasons for wanting him dead.The pudgy Green's doleful contemplation of his allotted glass of carrot juice and subsequent sneaking out for a steak will strike a sympathetic chord with any dieting reader. The tabloid account of the murder, ladled with gloriously overwrought prose ("It happened last night, at nine o'clock precisely. That hour will be forever graven on the tablets of memory"), suggests that Nichols was poking fun at Fleet Street, as he worked as a journalist during his career. The novel has some neat twists, sober wrestling by Green over ethical dilemmas (e.g., would the revelation of the murderer harm more people than it would help), and terrific writing such as the following:
[Superintendent Waller] had always loved the song of the wind in the pine trees. His life had been filled with very different echoes. The sound of voices raised in altercation, the wail of police cars, shrilling through mean city streets, the short, hoarse bark of a revolver in the dark . . . the final full- stop to the story of a human soul. It was nicer under the pine trees. (120)Sadly, Nichols's mysteries are out of print.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Beverley Nichols.
Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) seems to have been one of those versatile British men of letters. Writer, journalist, composer, and poet, he published his first book, Prelude, while he was at Oxford and covered the notorious Thompson-Bywaters murder trial in the early 1920s (listen to F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peep Show, based on the Thompson-Bywaters case, on BBC Radio 4 from Nov 5 to Nov 9th).
A friend of Noel Coward, Nellie Melba, and Queen Marie of Romania and a relative of John Masefield, Nichols caused considerable controversy when he confessed to trying to kill his alcoholic father in Father Figure (1972) and attacked Somerset Maugham in A Case of Human Bondage (1966) when Maugham falsely accused his dead wife of infidelity in print. (Best Nichols quote, quoting Coward on a photo of Maugham: "Dear Willie Maugham. The Lizard of Oz.")
Timber Press has reprinted Nichols's popular gardening books. He also wrote five mysteries featuring the mild-mannered Horatio Green, a keen gardener with a remarkable sense of smell: No Man's Street (1954), The Moonflower (aka The Moonflower Murder, 1955), Death to Slow Music (1956), The Rich Die Hard (1958), and Murder by Request (1960). I read The Moonflower Murder, in which a wealthy woman is killed in a house of scheming relatives and acquaintances. Despite some distracting episodes of "let's step outside the narrative now and look at Mr. Green" and Had-I-But-Known incidents, it's an interesting tale of a murder committed twice.
I have never understood this strange prejudice against complexes. I am a mass of complexes, and so are you, and I am quite devoted to them. The more the merrier, as far as I am concerned. — Beverley Nichols, Sunlight on the Lawn (148)
Beverley Nichols (1898-1983) seems to have been one of those versatile British men of letters. Writer, journalist, composer, and poet, he published his first book, Prelude, while he was at Oxford and covered the notorious Thompson-Bywaters murder trial in the early 1920s (listen to F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peep Show, based on the Thompson-Bywaters case, on BBC Radio 4 from Nov 5 to Nov 9th).A friend of Noel Coward, Nellie Melba, and Queen Marie of Romania and a relative of John Masefield, Nichols caused considerable controversy when he confessed to trying to kill his alcoholic father in Father Figure (1972) and attacked Somerset Maugham in A Case of Human Bondage (1966) when Maugham falsely accused his dead wife of infidelity in print. (Best Nichols quote, quoting Coward on a photo of Maugham: "Dear Willie Maugham. The Lizard of Oz.")
Timber Press has reprinted Nichols's popular gardening books. He also wrote five mysteries featuring the mild-mannered Horatio Green, a keen gardener with a remarkable sense of smell: No Man's Street (1954), The Moonflower (aka The Moonflower Murder, 1955), Death to Slow Music (1956), The Rich Die Hard (1958), and Murder by Request (1960). I read The Moonflower Murder, in which a wealthy woman is killed in a house of scheming relatives and acquaintances. Despite some distracting episodes of "let's step outside the narrative now and look at Mr. Green" and Had-I-But-Known incidents, it's an interesting tale of a murder committed twice.
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