Lancashire Evening Post

Lancashire Post Reviews Helen Nielsen’s Borrow the Night and The Fifth Caller

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Pam Norfolk’s review of this new reprint of Helen Nielsen’s novels was published today in the Lancashire Post and syndicated to 20 newspapers in the UK. Here’s an extract from the review: “American writer Helen Nielsen – a scriptwriter for episodes of the television dramas Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason – was a popular author in the late 1940s and the mid-1970s.”

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Madball by Fredric Brown

Litchfield Reviews Fredric Brown’s Madball for the Lancashire Post

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Nicholas Litchfield in the Lancashire Post: Fredric Brown, who died in 1972 at age 65, was an accomplished American mystery and science fiction author of more than 30 books and 300 short stories and vignettes. His debut novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, won the Edgar Award, and a number of his stories were adapted for the screen, including Martians, Go Home, Madman’s Holiday (filmed as Crack-Up), and The Screaming Mimi, which was the basis of a 1958 movie by Columbia Pictures and also an enormously successful Italian film titled The Bird With The Crystal Plumage.

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The Hoods Take Over by Ovid Demaris

Litchfield Reviews Ovid Demaris’s The Hoods Take Over for the Lancashire Post

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Nicholas Litchfield in the Lancashire Post: Reprinted from the late 1950s comes a tautly plotted, gritty tale of gang wars, racketeering, police corruption, and the dangers faced by a murder witness who risks his life to give testimony against powerful mobsters. Late American author Ovid E. Desmarais, better known as Ovid Demaris, was a journalist and bestselling author of thirty books. Praised for his investigative reporting on organized crime, political and business corruption, gambling and the underworld, several of his nonfiction books enjoyed a combined 64 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and have been translated and published in twenty-two countries.

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No Law Against Angels, Doll for a Big House, and Chlorine Makes a Killing by Carter Brown

Litchfield Reviews No Law Against Angels, Doll for a Big House, and Chorine Makes a Killing by Carter Brown

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Lancashire Post book review by Nicholas Litchfield: This triple dose of Carter Brown mysteries from 1957 finds homicide detective Al Wheeler investigating the deaths of two call girls, tracing a missing girl, and taking a job as a private investigator to clear a lawyer of a murder rap.No Law Against Angels, Doll for a Big House, and Chorine Makes a Killing are three light and lively entries in British-born Australian pulp writer Alan Geoffrey Yates’ phenomenally successful mystery series which spawned 300 books.

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The Made Up Man by Joseph Scapellato

Litchfield Reviews The Made-Up Man by Joseph Scapellato

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Lancashire Post book review by Nicholas Litchfield: Absurdist humour and existential noir intermingle in Joseph Scapellato’s playful and intelligent debut novel about a soul-searching archaeology school drop-out who finds himself at the centre of a strange and risky performance art project in the Czech Republic. Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Scapellato, who now lives in Pennsylvania, is an assistant professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at Bucknell University. His previous work, the critically acclaimed story collection Big Lonesome, received high praise from Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and the Lancashire Post, with the New York Times proclaiming: ‘Scapellato’s inventive, hallucinatory prose dazzles.’

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Lead With Your Left and The Best That Ever Did It by Ed Lacy

Litchfield Reviews Lead With Your Left and The Best That Ever Did It by Ed Lacy

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Lancashire Post book review by Nicholas Litchfield: Using the pseudonym Ed Lacy, American novelist Len Zinberg achieved fame as a writer of critically successful mysteries in the 1950s and ’60s. Winner of an Edgar Award for best novel in 1957 for Room to Swing, a typically hard-hitting story featuring African-American private detective Toussaint Moore, Lacy’s thirty novels have sold more than 28 million copies. Lead With Your Left and The Best That Ever Did It, two of the author’s finest works, are a pair of taut, fast-paced detective stories that are noted for their gritty realism and sharply defined central characters.

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Litchfield Reviews End of the Line by Bert and Dolores Hitchens

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“Born Julia Clara Catherine Dolores Robbins, prolific American novelist and playwright Dolores Hitchens began her career as a hospital nurse, and then a teacher, before becoming a successful professional writer. From 1938 until her death in 1973, she published forty books, utilising four nom-de-plumes. Her suspense novel The Watcher was adapted for the television series

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Litchfield Reviews So Many Doors by Oakley Hall

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First published by Random House in 1950, So Many Doors is the debut novel by Pulitzer Prize-nominated American writer Oakley Hall, an English professor emeritus at UC Irvine and author of 25 books, who died in 2008. During his distinguished career, Hall won numerous awards, including the Wrangler Award and the Western Writers of America

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