Kellings Manor, Wiltshire. January 1935. The snow is closing in. THE SEASLOTH REVIEW is pleased to offer readers the first chapter of Lauden McVey’s Death Comes to Kellings ahead of publication by Barbeque Books. An incomplete manuscript has been found among the papers of Lauden McVey — one of the great Queens of Crime, some said better than Christie, better…
Politicians seem to have shrunk. My brother and I were chuntering about it recently: how the figures we grew up with appeared more substantial, some even approaching the once-serious idea of statesmanship – a word that now feels faintly antique. Of course, the world was different. Times change, and so do our perceptions. Still, one tangible difference was that many…
Clifford Witting’s Measure for Murder (1941) belongs to that strand of Golden Age crime fiction whose pleasures lie as much in social observation as in puzzle-solving. One of the enduring appeals of the genre is the glimpse it can provide into an England now almost unrecognisable, yet still just within living memory. Here that includes the novelty of car ownership,…
The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille This is a very readable book, and what follows isn’t so much a review as a reflection prompted by it. The sordid shocking story it tells – of the Sullivanian therapy cult that operated in Manhattan from the 1950s until its collapse in 1991 –…
Biographical details about Barbara Shermund’s life are sparse, but Caitlin McGurk makes the most of what little is known. Her book Tell me A story Where the Bad Girl Wins: the Life and Art of Barbara Shermund includes a lavish selection of Shermund’s cartoons and artwork, reproduced in generous, glorious abundance. Shermund drew some cracking cartoons, many of the best…
I read a review of a “The Folded Clock: 100 Number Poems” that made this poetry collection peculiar enough to be intriguing. I recommend the review as a great introduction. The author is Gerhard Rühm, an author, composer and visual artist; he’s regarded as one of the key figures in the postwar European (neo)avant-garde, and his work crosses boundaries. He…
I started on a shelf-clearing exercise which – of course – was doomed from the get-go. I mean – if you are sorting through books, it’s guaranteed that you will very quickly find something that you must immediately sit down and read. The culprit in this particular case was a novella I’ve read twice before but – as the last…
When I think of the Durrell family, it’s Gerald who comes to mind as the one with the sense of humour. Back in my teaching days, the scene with the mother scorpion in the matchbox who launches herself at brother Larry (see sidebar) was always a surefire hit and led to all kinds of lively writing assignments. I’d always thought…
Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution”: Truth, Lies, and a Perfect Performance Christie published The Secret of Chimneys in 1925 and you can read an amusingly scathing review here. I am sure others may have more positive things to say. But Christie also published something else that year – a short story that has had a remarkable second life …
“Richmal Crompton, I salute you.” That is the final sentence of Kate Atkinson’s afterword to her novel A God in Ruins. (2015). She is acknowledging, of course, her debt to Crompton’s William stories. Atkinson’s novel follows the life of Teddy Todd – would-be poet, bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather – as he navigates the turbulence of the twentieth century.…
The Illuminating Diary of a Professional LadyReading Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes “A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would…
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” – Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice Nicola Sturgeon, the divisive former First Minister of Scotland, has published her memoir Frankly. Far from a triumph, it has been met with scathing reviews from critics who see her legacy as one of…
What if the man you’re rooting for in a wartime darkly comic thriller is also a serial killer? In Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943), Donald Henderson gives us just that: a shabby, lonely public-school man with a bleak past, a murderer burdened by a morbid wish to be caught. (You can read the novel here.) One aspect of the…
One of the pleasures of events like the #1952Club is the chance to stumble across something unexpected and delightful – and A Perch in Paradise by Margaret Bullard is exactly that. Why this deliciously wicked novel has not been reissued by one of those publishing houses that specialize in forgotten gems by women is a mystery. Someone needs to get…
As might be guessed from Seamus Feamus, I’ve been reading – and thoroughly enjoying – The Pilgrimage of Peregrine Prykke. (How did I get to this age without having read it before?) This is Clive James’s parody of 1970s literary London and it got me thinking about the enduring and peculiar proclivity of poetical types to self-pollinate and propagate peculiar…