Nick Krauser's Blog, page 16

#84 – The Case Of The Howling Dog, Erle Stanley Gardner BOOK REVIEW

Fans of Sherlock Holmes [1] are well aware of the dog that didn’t bark. It comes in The Adventure Of The Silver Blaze, in which a rapscallion stable-lad tries to nobble a race horse before a big event only for …

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#83 – Thank You Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse BOOK REVIEW

I’ve been watching more of the Masterclass video seminar series of late, with a focus on the writing courses. The first, Aaron Sorkin’s, was really good and then David Mamet’s was helpful too. They were all about screenwriting but now …

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#82 – Your Turn Mr Moto, John P Marquand BOOK REVIEW

James Bond before James Bond. Doesn’t that sound like a good book? Well, sonny Jim, if you’ve already been following my reviews of Dennis Wheatley you’ll be aware he had a lock on the whole dashing English secret agent racket …

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Ask Jimmy #3

This new series seems to have gone down well so I have endeavoured to squeeze more blood from the stone that is Jimmy. The text is all his, and the footnotes are mine. Qu. Where is the line between working …

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Cargo Cult Daygame

Back in the good old days of Empire, explorers from Europe would sail the high seas and discover savage tribes. Whether it was Columbus headed West or Captain Cook headed East, it was a surprise to both the civilised and …

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#81 – The Island Of Adventure, Enid Blyton BOOK REVIEW

Long before J K Rowling wrote the execrable Harry Potter series there was a real queen of children’s fiction, Enid Blyton. Whereas JKR is a lunatic leftist who frequently lies on Twitter to further global-homo causes, Blyton was a traditionalist …

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#80 – The Forty-Five Guardsmen, Alexandre Dumas BOOK REVIEW

Eighty books! I’m not fucking around am I? Some of them are proper big bastards too, like this one. My goal is to knock off a hundred books this year and, by God, I think I’ll do it! There’s something …

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#79 – Graveyard Rats, Robert E. Howard BOOK REVIEW

I first discovered the writings of my favourite author, Robert E. Howard, by accident. I knew of Conan The Barbarian initially through the choose-your-own-adventure book Deathtrap Dungeon. I was just a kid and those Fighting Fantasy books fascinated me, building …

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#78 – The Case of The Velvet Claws, Erle Stanley Gardner BOOK REVIEW

  I’m a fan of snappy dialogue. It’s why I used to read Elmore Leonard adventure stories even though they were incredibly predictable – he was a master of snappy talk. It’s a reason why I try to memorise all …

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#77 – The Ambushers, Donald Hamilton BOOK REVIEW

It gets hard to think of interesting things to say about a series of books that follows a formula. So, I thought I’d make the formula itself the topic of today’s musings. This is the sixth Matt Helm book, The …

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