My first post in my first blog! I'm a huge fan of the Golden Age of crime/mystery fiction, and having a permanent place to record my thoughts, reviews and purchases of all things mysterious will hopefully push me further with my own fiction writing (I am the world's worst procrastinator!).
Yesterday I visited the only second-hand bookstore in town I haven't ransacked before (what took me so long?!). I bought two books worth mentioning... First up, a 1966 Fontana paperback copy of Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie (originally published 1945). I collect one thing and that's Agatha Christie paperbacks with Tom Adams cover art. And this copy has a cover I don't have yet... I'm always excited when I find one I don't have, as I have over 95 and surely there can't be many left now! Sparkling Cyanide brings my total collection to 98.
The second book is Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews - First Series edited by Malcolm Cowley (Penguin, 1985 reprint). I'm always interested in how writers write, so I grabbed this as soon as I saw which writers had been interviewed: Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Georges Simenon, Truman Capote... I know only Simenon wrote crime/mystery, but I enjoyed Parker's short stories and Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's.
I started Writers at Work this morning over breakfast. So far I've learnt that Capote would not tolerate the presence of yellow roses and that Hemingway sharpened 20 pencils each morning to ready himself for the day of writing ahead.
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