They Got Away With Murder

Many murders are solved, but unfortunately many are also not and the perpetrators never face justice. Leonard Gribble's book collects together a number of these unsolved crimes, both from the UK and abroad. The book was published in 1971, so maybe there have been breakthroughs in some of these cases in the fifty odd years since... alas no, i looked up all of the cases and all remain unsolved crimes.

The variety is good, including domestic murders and suspicious deaths, at first thought to be suicide but later found to probably not be. The book is well written and and keeps you engaged with good build-up and post-crime information. The variety of crimes and settings also helps.

All these crimes took place long before DNA evidence and mass camera surveillance were things, so maybe that would have caught some of the murderers out otherwise. Truthfully though, if you have no link to the victim and no one actually witnessed you committing the crime then it is a lot easier to get away with murder than you might imagine. Or fear.

Topper Annual 1980

If the Beano and Dandy comics were the A-team then the Beezer and Topper were the very creditable B-team. I was more a Beano boy myself but liked a bit of Beryl the Peril. The mischievous girl appears several times here in this 1980 edition of the Topper annual, along with a number of other characters i either did not know or had forgotten about (and some of them its just as well).

However, some characters new to me were great such as Nick Kelly and Cedric, a pair of bungling detectives. Piggy Banks, a walking pig who eats money and the gigantic dog Tiny maybe were more surreal than funny but a good read.

The annual overall is a bit patchy, and should be filed under "interesting" than "hilarious".

A Wave of Fatalities

This novel by Michael Delving is one of those frequent entries in the Modern Collins series from the 1970s and 1980s which portrayed a professional in a different field getting involved in a serious crime and becoming an amateur detective to help solve it.

Our hero in this case is an American antique dealer and his wife, visiting the UK looking for interesting antiques to buy. He comes across a very interesting medieval box of Jewish origin but, before he can close the deal, the owner is murdered and the box goes missing.

Although also a suspect in the case, our man helps the police investigate the case (although not officially). The theme of being an outsider and how others react to you is to the fore throughout this interesting story full of suspect and interesting characters.

The Black Hole Annual 1981

The Black Hole was a great film from 1979 (although a bit of a flop, i've always enjoyed it). This is a tie-in annual from 1981 and is the usual fare of comic strips, games and features from the film. The comic strips take up most of the annual and are a continuation of the storyline after the end of the film, This is pretty cute though uses the cheat of a parallel universe so all the characters who died in the film can reappear!

Other that the comic strip there isn't that much else in the annual but there are a few decent photographs of the characters and some production artwork. I enjoyed the story though, i've always liked random tie-in comic strips to TV shows or movies, especially as the drawn characters seldom have much resemblance to the screen version!

Proofing book 3

Production of book 4 is well underway but had to take a back seat this week as i had book 3 to proof! Book 3 is the second in my series on railway stations, this time the railway stations of the West Midlands. Now, there are a lot of stations in this county so i had no problem getting enough photography for sure. My main problem was leaving stuff out.

I wasn't that happy with the book when i submitted it but having seen the draft i am a lot more content now. It looks like it will be a pretty good book when it is out later in the year. Now to return to book 4...

Dark Days

Day Days by Hugh Conway is set in the late 19th century (and was written then too) and is a piece of Victorian melodrama. Dr North falls in love with the beautiful Philippa. Or, should i say, he becomes a love sick puppy over her.

Unfortunately for him, she marries someone else. Dr North is therfore heartbroken and escapes away to the countryside to bury himself in his work. Then a few years later, Philippa comes back into his life, unhappy in her marriage. Dr North hopes that she will finally come away with him but then we discover she has murdered her abusive partner and now needs Dr North's help to covering up her crime...

Overall, this is a reasonable read and has some interesting ideas and a good plot, though the overt emotionalism of the love-sick narrator (North) can be a bit off putting at times, especially early on.