Joe Lynch is a thirty-something English teacher at Haddon Park Academy. He had married Mel nearly a decade ago, and together they have a four-year-old son, William. When William was born, Joe had cut down his hours at work to let Mel keep the career she loved, and from the beginning, you get the sense […]
E. C. Bentley’s story is one for mystery lovers! In it, Arthur Freer had died in a golf course under mysterious circumstances a few months back. Freer, a bully and an occasional wife-beater, wasn’t a popular guy in his village. But he had been an excellent golf player who was committed to the game. To […]
Auschwitz Lullaby, which is based on a true story, begins one morning in Berlin when Nazis arrive at Helene Hannemann’s home while she is getting ready to leave for work. Helene is a German Aryan nurse married to Johann, a Gypsy. So since the WWII started times have been tough for the Hannemann family. Johann has […]
The golf maniac in Stephen Leacock’s story is Llewellyn Smith. The Golfomaniac is a short tale with only 5 pages and revolves around a conversation that takes place between Smith and the story’s narrator who are both keen golf players. Smith often takes the same suburban train as the narrator, and this prompts a dialogue […]
At one point in Like Death, Richard Howard’s elegant translation of Guy de Maupassant’s fifth novel Fort comme la Mort, Olivier Bertin the novel’s protagonist mentions that his heart is “worm-eaten with love.” After reading Maupassant’s reflective and evocative prose, that is exactly how I feel about this book and its lovers’ fate! Let me […]
Next up in Golf Stories is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams which I’ve already reviewed. So I’m moving onto the next story. B-) In Mr. Frisbie, we have a tale narrated by a chauffeur. Allen Frisbie is the name that the story’s unnamed chauffeur has given his employer to “save his identity.” According to our […]
After reading the outstanding vintage crime novel The Colour of Murder, I had an appetite for some more Julian Symons. And as luck would have it, British Library Crime Classics published another one of Symons’s books this month! Christopher Barrington is the narrator of The Belting Inheritance which is set in a grand old country house called the […]
There are many sportsmen who have fallen into superstitions. You can find multiple lists featuring these weird rituals online (most bizarre for me was Les Miles’s game-time tradition. While Miles was the football coach at Louisiana State University, apparently he had a pre-game ritual of eating grass off the field!). Bernard Darwin’s short story The Wooden Putter looks […]
Had The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock not been shortlisted for Women’s Prize for Fiction, I don’t think I’d have picked it up. It’s historical fiction, with a dash of romance and fantasy thrown in for good measure. Since the latter is not my jam, I found the notion of reading a 500-page novel featuring mermaids […]
Next up in Golf Stories is The Last Round written by Holworthy Hall. Holworthy Hall is the pseudonym adopted by American writer Harold Everett Porter, who had based his pen name on the name of the dormitory where he lived as a first-year student in Havard. Holworthy Hall was a passionate golf player, and according […]
On a chilly Saturday night, during a winter snowstorm, Richard Bowmaster hits the road in a rush to take his cat, Très to the veterinarian. Richard is a sixty-something professor at the New York University who lives a solitary life in his brownstone apartment in Brooklyn with his four cats as his sole companions. So […]
Next up in Golf Stories is a story by A. W. Tillinghast. I think golfers will be familiar with Tillinghast – apparently, he was an American architect who designed over 250 golf courses. Tillinghast’s contribution to golf seems immense – he had been added to World Golf Hall of Fame in 2015, and you can […]
In Sight, which was shortlisted for Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018, the unnamed narrator is a young woman who is expecting her second child. With her husband, Johannes the narrator already has a daughter, however, the decision to have a child had been a difficult one for her at first. The narrator writes how […]
Years ago, while I was still in school, I tried to read P. G. Wodehouse’s The Clicking of Cuthbert. That was my first time reading Wodehouse, and it didn’t go well probably because I knew next to nothing about golf. So I was a bit worried about picking Golf Stories as my next short story […]
I think I have found my new favorite British Library Crime Classic! The Colour of Murder is a gripping novel broken into two sections. Part One: Before is a tale of psychological intrigue, which is followed by Part Two: After where courtroom drama takes place upon the discovery of the crime. Before opens with John […]
