Authors: J.J. Marric and Dell Shannon

 

 Hello followers!!! I have been slack on posting the books I have been reading. Why? Can I blame it on the snow I had here in my fair city?

 

No?

 

O.K.

Well I take a picture of the book cover and place it at the top of my post for your enjoyment and I did, I really did, but for some reason my PhotoshopElements is still not behaving. Oh well. Can I blame that on the solar flare that has been causing havoc upon the Earth?

 

No?

 

Well I say yes to blaming the sun's tantrum because I really wanted you to enjoy the old paper jackets on the collection of the old detective/murder books from these two authors. My mother gave me her collection of them in 2011. I am just now reading them. I can't blame that on anything or anyone but myself.

 

J.J. Marric's main character, George Gideon, is Commander of London's Criminal Investigation Department, and solves cases with panache. Perhaps a little methodically slow and that's what the read is as well ... slow but steady. I find they are good fillers between more in depth and involved reading. I really wish you could see the covers. They remind me of the black and white Masterpiece Theatre figures that would pass across one's TV screen mysteriously before Alistair Cooke would quietly tell us from his cozy chair what we were about to see.

 

 My mother had checked off in pencil the books she had read by Marric which were listed on the page before the title "Gideon's Badge". This story took Gideon and his wife across the ocean to a steaming and humid New York. Each of Marric's book titles start with the word "Gideon's _______" and then one word follows. Easy to find or look up.

 

Well I looked him up online and found to my amazement that his real name was John Creasey and he was was born in 1908 and died in 1973 but not before he wrote "more than six hundred novels using twenty-eight different pseudonyms"! He wrote not only in crime but also in science fiction. So if you like his style of writing and his characters then you have a zillion books you can pick up at your local library. My goodness!! When did you ever sleep?

 

Now on to Dell Shannon whose main character is Luis Mendoza who works in homicide for the L.A.P.D. Again, Shannon's books are also slow and plodding but have a bit of humour thrown in from time to time. I looked Dell up too online and to my second amazement found out that the 'he' in my mind was a 'she'. Dell Shannon was really Barbara "Elizabeth" Linnington who was born in 1921 and died in 1988. She was a "prolific American novelist", says Wikipedia, and was "regarded as the "Queen of the Procedurals." She was one of the first women to write 'police procedurals'  — a male-dominated genre of police-story writing."  Well no wonder she had to write as a male!! You go girl!

So if you feel like helping Mendoza or Gideon solve a crime or two then check these copious author's books out.