The Judge Dee mysteries by Robert Van Gulik are also all good. There’s about a dozen of them. Some of them are better than others, but they’re all very enjoyable. Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat in China and Japan for many years. A diligent scholar and a very imaginative […]
Chandler isn’t as subtle as Hammett, but he makes up for it with imagination and verve.
Dashiell Hammett served in an ambulance corps during World War I and he contracted influenza and tuberculosis. His service in the Aleutian Islands in World War II, when he was in his fifties, worsened his health problems and his incarceration by the House Unamerican Activities Committee pretty much killed him, […]
Nice looking horse, don’t you think?This sketch was made by A. R. Waud, an illustrator from Harper’s weekly.It appeared in the August, 1957 issue of American Heritage.
On my list of authors who do not disappoint, Dashiell Hammett is number one. I grab every book of his that I find. If I have them already, I give them to friends. Hammett only wrote one bad book, “The Dain Curse,” and even that’s worth reading. The brilliant, lifelike […]
My last three blog entries were based on two stories from one issue of American Heritage, August 1957. But in that same issue there are nine other stories that are just as interesting: *one about Cotton Mather fighting the doctors of Boston to allow innoculation against smallpox in that city […]
I mentioned before that you can’t do better than old copies of American Heritage. I’ve got a stack of them in the throne room. In the same edition as the story of Jane Honeyman, August 1957, there’s a story by C. S. Forester (the author of the famous Captain Hornblower […]
John Honeyman first met with George Washington in Philadelphia in 1775. They were both veterans of the French and Indian War. Honeyman, a weaver at the time, agreed to act as a secret agent, and they decided he was more likely to make himself useful to the British as a […]
