The Passing Tramp

I finally decided to commit to doing a Cornell Woolrich biography and have a publisher.

In the two decades between 1940 and 1960 Cornell Woolrich published 16 crime or weird novels, with the quality great tapering off, by common consensus, in the second decade.

"Ay, ay, ay, ay Canto y no llores (Sing and don't cry)" --"Cielito Lindo," Mexican folksong Cornell George Hopley Woolrich was born in New York City on December 4, 1903, eleven months after his parents Genaro and Claire wed on New Year's Day at the Episco…

For someone who spent over thirty-five years living in New York apartment hotels and increasingly not getting out much (in his last years he seldom ventured beyond the hotel lobby), Cornell Woolrich had a surprisingly cosmopolitan ancestry.

Silent as the Grave, publisher Centipede's latest edition of Cornell Woolrich short fiction, is available now.

What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor Early in the Morning Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor Shave His Belly with a Rusty Razor Early in the Mo…

first American edition reprinted by Dell One thing I enjoy about Sara Woods is how she varied her London settings with more than occasional jaunts to Yorkshire, taking her brilliant barrister-sleuth Antony Maitland up north to her own native ground, where…

Last month--incidentally Pride Month--crime fiction author and leading critic Martin Edwards found space on his blog to give two sentences of about 100 words over to a consideration of my essay collection Nothing Darker Than the Night, which was published…

The Book of Tobit is an apocryphal biblical text, still found, so I read, in Catholic Bibles but not Protestant ones, which tells the tale of Tobit, Tobit's son Tobias and Sarah.

"Whoever likes [their] murders multitudinous will find them here....

Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot short story "Yellow Iris" was first published in The Strand in July 1937.

Very interesting, Gethryn!

American first edition The page-long authors' blurb on the back of the dust jacket of The Dark Wheel (1948), a suspense novel co-authored by Philip MacDonald and A.

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best....They're sending people that have lots of problems....They're bringing drugs.

[Philip] MacDonald is at once a craftsman of writing, whose prose, characterization and evocation of mood (comic or terrible) might be envied by the most serious literary practitioner, and a craftsman of plot technique, whose construction and misdirection…

William O'Farrell in his late thirties (!)

Two posts ago, you may recall, I discussed the matter of whether the bathtub corpse in Dorothy L.

As the Passing Tramp blog achieved fifteen years of existence late last november, its views also starting shooting upward.

Dorothy L.

"Would you care to marry the daughter of a vicious murderess?"

Whence did our prolific lad Philip MacDonald derive the pen name "Martin Porlock"?

One more Philip MacDonald detective fiction review and then on to something else.

Mystery writer Philip MacDonald completed the manuscript of Mystery at Friar's Pardon in August 1931 and in England it was published, under his new mystery writer pseudonym Martin Porlock, in October.

"Would you rid the world of a dangerous snake?

"I'm slaying in the rain...." 1944 Collins Canadian pb ed of Murder Gone Mad oddly suggesting it's set in Canada WHO IS THE BUTCHER?