Some more Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer detective novels

I had seen and lost some secondhand Ross Macdonald novels some months back due to procrastination (ooh …) and also due to some vague sort of discontent regarding pricing … then I felt I was overacting (mmm …).  This was on one of the used books portals on amazon which has a good collection of some hard to get books, both fiction and non-fiction.  I had found and purchased short-story collections of Hammett and Chandler, and some titles of the special set Martin Beck series, the Joe Gores novels … all from here.  I always do this, I do this shillyshallying at the beginning, though I desperately want to buy them books, and then I put them in the shopping cart, I want for a couple of days, nothing happens, I keep visiting the cart … and then what do I see … two of the books in my shopping cart are ‘no longer available with the seller’ … then I say shadaa and slap my (right) palm against my forehead … why didn’t I buy the books that day itself … and all that. 

So, when I found five Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald a couple of weeks back, I hesitated for a while … of course, I wanted all of them … I waited for a couple of days, and then I said whadhdha hell … and here they are …

Sleeping Beauty and The Zebra Striped Hearse are old editions … Sleeping Beauty was written in 1973 and this is a 1975 edition … The Zebra Striped Hearse was written in 1962 and this is a 1978 edition … very old ya, almost reaching antique proportions … and they are contemporaneous with the author, who lived till 1983 … I hoped against hope that one of these would be author signed … he he he …

These are editions published in 1988 and 1996 … not too recent … but the covers, which are not exciting as the earlier two, and also monotonous, make them look as if they are more recent editions …

Off to Mediaeval England with Brother Cadfael, the Benedictine Detective …

As soon as I started reading A Morbid Taste for Bones, a novel I found at Abids during my previous visit, I knew this would happen … it happened more sooner that even I anticipated … A Morbid Taste for Bones, I discovered, to my great joy and pleasure, is the first in the series of Brother Cadfael mystery novels by Ellis Peters (the pseudonym of Edith Mary Pargeter) … set in 12^th century England, these novels are historical murder mysteries, proudly calling themselves ‘Mediaeval whodunits’ … another name I came across for this genre is ‘mystoricals’ and Ellis Peters is said to have revived interest among readers and writers in the ‘historical mystery’ novel …

The ‘detective,’ if one may call him so, in these Mediaeval whodunits is Brother Cadfael … a man of many talents and skills which he acquired when he was a soldier and sailor before deciding to don the robes in his forties by entering the Benedictine Abbey at Shrewsbury … he is also a talented herbalist, apart from being a skilled observer of human nature … and so, Brother Cadfael is consulted as a doctor, detective, becomes a diplomat, spokesperson, and so on …

A Morbid Taste for Bones sets the stage for a display of Brother Cadfael’s many talents … the reader sees him as a diplomat soothing ruffled feathers, a detective who uses his observational skills and medical knowledge to solve a murder, his knowledge of weapons also comes into use … all in all it was a very satisfying read and I enjoyed it … and I wanted more … mmm … not surprising …

I did what I always did when caught in this kind of situation … I went to my online secondhand book sources and wanted to see what was available … I thought there’d only be a few of these medieval whodunits … ha ha ha … tough luck and a big test of my self-control … I located the mother lode, sort of … except for a couple of them, I found the rest of the series of 20 novels … and priced well …  but this time, I exercised self-control big time and wanted to go step-by-step … and bought only three novels … numbers two, three, and four in the series … and look at the covers …