Red Wolf's Room

  After reading Footsteps in the Dark , I tried to find more obscure female mystery writers that are not quite so well known and found The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham. What interested me was the dinner party that turns into murder. It reminded me of the Hercules Poirot mystery Lord Edgeware Dies and Clue .  Unfortunately, the murder gets upstaged for the second half of the book by another crime, and the solution to the first mystery was unnecessarily dragged out for me. I lost interest in the last third of the book and just wanted it to end. The book is written in true Roaring Twenties lingo, so there were quite a few times where I couldn't understand what the characters were saying, even with context.  In the reviews I read before picking up this book, I learned that Albert Campion is Margery Allingham's detective, but his debut novel (this book) does not have him as the protagonist and frankly, he's not even a detective. He is strangely almost always up...

Photo by Donny Jiang on Unsplash As you may or may not know, Nancy Drew is still a popular heroine today. People continue to rewrite her story and modernize it to appeal to a new audience. However, those of us who have read the classic yellow hardback series know how Nancy and her origin was more or less written (several of the original stories from the 30s were rewritten a few times over the decades, so the yellow hardbacks we have today are not 100% original).  I am an avid Nancy Drew fan and reviewed the 2002 Disney movie of Nancy Drew where she's in college. This new 2019 iteration of the sleuth has Nancy hanging out with her friends Bess and George in one of the lower high school levels. We learn early on that Nancy used to see them only during summers. NOTE: This post contains spoilers for this movie (obvi) and HeR Interactive's games  The Ghost of Thornton Hall  and Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake . Opening credits still from  Nancy Drew: The Hidden Staircase Synops...