I’ve read dozens of Agatha Christie mysteries over the years. I have a small shelf of Christie mysteries that I’m slowly reading–a couple a year–trying to make them last (I’m doing the same thing with Anthony Trollop novels). I find it difficult to reread Christie classics like Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, and Death on the Nile once I know Whodunit.

I’ve been reading Agatha Christie’s short stories–about one or two a week. This 691 page collection brings together 39 of Christie’s short stories grouped by the character solving the crime: Parker Pyne, Harley Quin, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple.

With this doorstop volume, I’ve been jumping around. I’m not a big fan of Parker Pyne or Harley Quin but I’m dutifully reading their stories. I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite between Poirot and Marple. Sometimes “the little gray cells” annoy me. Miss Marple lives in the Murder Capital of the World: St. Mary Mead. I admire her ability to see what others don’t.

Are you an Agatha Christie fan? Do you prefer Pyne, Quin, Poirot, or Marple? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

PART ONE: Parker Pyne — 1

Meeting Parker Pyne — by Agatha Christie –3

Case of the middle-aged wife — 5

Case of the discontented soldier — 18

Case of the distressed lady — 36

Case of the discontented husband — 47

Case of the city clerk — 60

Case of the rich woman — 75

Have you got everything you want? — 90

Gate of Baghdad — 104

House at Shiraz — 130

Pearl of price — 133

Death on the Nile — 145

Oracle at Delphi — 159

PART TWO: Harley Quin — 173

Presenting Mr. Harley Quin — by Agatha Christie — 175

Coming of Mr. Quin — 177

Shadow on the glass — 195

At the Bells and Motley — 217

Sign in the sky — 235

Soul of the croupier — 252

World’s end — 269

Voice in the dark — 289

Face of Helen — 307

Dead Harlequin — 325

Bird with the broken wing — 348

Man from the sea — 368

Harlequin’s Lane — 396

Love detectives — 419

PART THREE: Hercule Poirot –441

Third-floor flat — 443

Adventure of Johnnie Waverly — 461

Four and twenty blackbirds — 474

Double clue — 489

Double sin — 500

Wasps’ nest — 515

Theft of the royal ruby — 525

Second gong — 569

PART FOUR: Miss Jane Marple

Strange jest — 595

Tape-measure murder — 607

Case of the perfect maid — 621

Case of the caretaker — 634

Greenshaw’s folly — 648

Sanctuary — 672

I confess: I buy a lot of stuff from AMAZON. Mostly books. But also music CDs, Blu-rays, vitamins, and other essentials. Do you do business with AMAZON?

I grew up listening to The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, and The Vandellas, and many more Girl Groups in the early 1960s. I loved songs like “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Then He Kissed Me,” and “Be My Baby” and celebrated when those songs made it to Number One on the BILLBOARD charts.

As Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz describe this musical era, the story of the Girl Group Sound was also a tale of race and power. The women singers, most of whom were Black and many of whom were only teenagers when their first songs were recorded, were cultivated, packaged, and marketed by a music industry that eventually cut them out of the lion’s share of their profits.

Although many of the Girl Groups would tour with Civil Rights leaders and performed at some of the earliest desegregated concerts, many of the singers found themselves cast aside by the record companies as trends shifted in favor of the largely white British Invasion bands of the mid to late ’60s.

While over Time the voices of the Girl Group Sound have become essential to the American musical canon, many of the singers remain all but anonymous to most listeners. Weaving together over 300 hours of interviews across more than 90 singers and music industry insiders, But Will You Love Me Tomorrow: An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups gives voice to the many women of the era who have long been consigned to silence.

But Will You Love Me Tomorrow captures a time when young girls found a brief moment in music history when artistic success was possible. The tales of their struggles and of the inequity faced by these women at that time make a compelling story. Do you have a favorite Girl Groups? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION — xi

The beginnings of the girl group sound: the 1950s — 1

The sound on the street: 1960-1963 –73

Hitsville USA, 1960-1963 — 137

Topping the charts: 1963-1964 — 175

Motown becomes the sound of young America: 1964-1966 — 235

The end of an era: 1965-1970 — 261

Motown outgrows Detroit: 1967-present — 303

Coming back together and saying goodbye: 1970-present — 353

Acknowledgements — 415

Bibliography — 417

Index — 423

It’s crunch time for the Buffalo Bills . If they want to make the Playoffs, they’re going to have to beat some Good Teams…like the 9-1 Eagles. The Bills are 3 1/2 point underdogs. The Eagles are coming off a big win over the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football. Will the Eagles experience a Let Down? Bills fans can only hope. How will your favorite NFL team perform today?

I’ve watched the previous four seasons of Fargo so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect: Weirdness and Violence. Noah Hawley writes a series of stories that follows the structure from the Coen Brothers’ classic movie, Fargo. Only Hawley amps up the weirdness and violence. For example, the first episode of Fargo, Season 5 (the first of 10 episodes) opens at a School Board meeting in a suburb of Minneapolis in 2019 that breaks into a riot. Dorothy “Dot” Lyon (Juno Temple who starred in Ted Lasso) gets arrested and that event triggers a violent home invasion.

Dot is hiding her past which involves a dictator-like Sheriff (played by Jon Hamm) and his psycho son, Gator (Joe Keery), and a kilt-clad mercenary, Ole Munch (Sam Spruell). The violence follows Dot as she tries to protect her loving husband, Wayne Lyon (David Rysdahl) and her daughter, Scotty Lyon (Sienna King).

Will Dot be able to defend herself and her family from the killers coming after her? Can she outwit her wealthy mother-in-law, Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who despises Dot? I’ll be watching to find out! GRADE: INCOMPLETE (but treading towards an A)

David Geherin’s The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction (Unger, 1985) delivers a quick and breezy history of Private Eye fiction in America. He takes a few unexpected turns that I appreciated. For example, I can’t remember many histories of Private Eye fiction that included Jo Gar, a hard-boiled detective whose cases in the Philippine Islands crackle with violence. Jo Gar, of Filipino-Spanish descent, stars in 24 stories that Raoul Whitfield wrote for the pulps. Whitfield, best known for his mysteries Green Ice and Death in a Bowl , produces his best work in his Jo Gar stories.

I also found Geherin’s analysis of Bill Pronzini perceptive. Like some of the other writers Geherin includes in this book like Frederick Nebel and Norbert Davis, Pronzini deserves more attention and readers.

Once again, Geherin neglects to include any female private eyes. But, for the range of this book, there’s plenty of information and analysis worth reading. If you’re a fan of Private Eye fiction, The American Private Eye is worth a look. Do you have a favorite Private Eye? GRADE: A-

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Foreword: Galahad for hire — ix

1. Birth of a hero — 1

Race Williams (Carroll John Daly) — 8

The Continental Op (Dashiell Hammett) — 16

2. The pulpsters — 26

Jo Gar (Raoul Whitfield) — 30

Tough Dick Donohue (Frederick Nebel) — 36

Jack “Flashgun” Casey (George Harmon Coxe) — 42

Steve Midnight (John K. Butler) — 46

Max Latin (Norbert Davis) — 50

Dan Turner (Robert Leslie Bellem) — 56

3. Life beyond the pulps — 63

William Crane (Jonathan Latimer) — 64

Philip Marlowe (Raymond Chandler)

Rex McBride (Cleve F. Adams) — 78

Mike Shayne (Brett Halliday) — 84

4. Postwar P.I.s — 93

Paul Pine (Howard Browne) — 95

Max Thursday (Wade Miller) — 103

Carney Wilde (Bart Spicer) — 110

Shell Scott (Richard S. Prather) — 115

Mike Hammer (Mickey Spillane) — 120

5 . The compassionate eye — 132

Lew Archer (Ross Macdonald) — 133

Mac (Thomas B. Dewey) — 140

Brock Callahan (William Campbell Gault) — 147

Dan Fortune (Michael Collins) — 155

6. After Archer — 163

Spenser (Robert B. Parker) — 164

Nameless (Bill Pronzini) — 166

Albert Samson (Michael Z. Lewin) — 172

Dave Brandstetter (Joseph Hansen) — 176

Jacob Asch (Arthur Lyons) — 183

Matt Scudder (Lawrence Block) — 190

7. An enduring hero — 197

Notes — 203

Bibliography — 211

Index — 223

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family! Patrick, Katie, and their friends prepared a wonderful Holiday feast: chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, two different stuffings, pierogi, latkes, green beans, broccoli, pumpkin soup, homemade rolls, and cranberry jello salad.

Desserts: pecan pie, apple pie, banana cream pie (with a peanut butter crust and Carmel drizzle), homemake chocolate chip cookies, charcuterie board, and four different mini-cakes.

We had a great time on Thanksgiving and hope you did, too!

In 1964, Ballantine Books published Future Tense, a short collection of stories by Jack Vance. In 1981, DAW Books reprinted the collection under the title, Dust of Far Suns.

The first story in both books is “Dust of Far Suns,” one of Jack Vance’s most famous stories. A curmudgeonly old man named Henry Belt is assigned a small group of eight young men . These Cadets have signed up for a 2-year space voyage with Henry Belt who will test them for their ability to deal with the demands of space travel. Henry Belt’s tests are clever and diabolical!

In “Dodkin’s Job,” a young man named Luke Grogatch tries to fight a dysfunctional bureaucracy. After many failure, Luke tries a completely different strategy.

“Ullward’s Retreat” is another of Vance’s well known stories. Jack Vance admitted that “Ullward’s Retreat” was one of his favorite stories. On an overcrowded future Earth, privacy and living space is in short supply. In order to impress his friends, a vastly wealthy man named Ullward leases a continent from a spaceman who has laid claim to an entire habitable world. But Ullward finds more problems with this arrangement than he had considered.

“The Gift of Gab” is a mystery story. A group of prospectors search for minerals on a planet that is supposed to be devoid of intelligent life. But when a couple of the prospectors disappear, some of the prospectors start to suspect that the decapods, a creature similar to a squid, could have intelligence higher than expected. The solution to the mystery resolves some problems but creates others.

Jack Vance, known for his Demon Princes novels, shows in this collection he’s equally adept at writing compelling short stories. GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Dust of Far Suns — 7

Dodkin’s Job — 37

Ullward’s Retreat — 78

The Gift of Gab — 104

I found this DVD set at a local thrift store for a dollar. I’ve seen all of these movies multiple times but The Good, The Bad and The Ugly stands out from the rest. Are you a Clint Eastwood fan? Do you enjoy Spaghetti Westerns? GRADE: A for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, B for the rest

Roz Chast is my favorite cartoonist in The New Yorker. I also enjoy Roz Chast’s books. I loved Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant (you can read my review here) which deals with Chast’s aging parents in both a funny and poignant way.

I Must Be Dreaming, Chast’s new book, is pure silliness. Chast’s dreams feature Ted Less-So and a romantic interlude with Danny Devito. (see below). Chast makes browsing her dreams easier by grouping them by themes in her chapters.

Do you remember your dreams? Do you have reoccurring dreams? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION — 1

I Must Be Dreaming — 13

Recurring Dreams — 15

Lucid Dreams — 18

Celebrity Dreams — 22

Cartoon-Idea Dreams — 37

Nightmares — 45

Body Horror — 51

Food Dreams — 59

Everyday Dreams — 67

Dream fragments, or Ones That Got Away — 91

A Note about The Dreams — 95

A Brief Tour through Dream-Theory Land — 97

Recommended Reading — 118