Member bpym

As a teenager I spent lots of time at used book sales carefully collecting used paperbacks of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John MacDonald and Ross Macdonald. I loved, and still love the hardboiled style, and still have all of these paperbacks although they are a bit musty now. The books I collect now are also mostly paperback mysteries, mainly because I like to re-read them, but none are in great condition. My history books and serious academic books are mostly about urban and colonial studies and/or about Southeast Asia.

I work in higher education and love to read. I should be reading academic books in my areas of interest but most of the time really prefer to read mysteries, especially classics set in England or in the pre-1950s US. I have recently been working through some of the slightly forgotten mystery writers of yesteryear including Elizabeth Daly, Patricia Wentworth and Cyril Hare, and of course the pre-Cadfael Ellis Peters and Dorothy Sayers (although those two are not much overlooked at all). I've also recently discovered Michael Gilbert and Michael Innes, although don't have many of their books yet.

I am also a fan of Alan Furst novels,of Barbara Pym, of Russian fiction and non-fiction, and of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Edith Wharton. I suppose I am an Anglophile at heart, which probably helps explain my reading preferences.