Murder of the Orient Express

I’ve written several blogfolio posts about Agatha Christie’s works. From that, please infer that I am a fan of Mrs. Christie’s. I can lay claim to having read all her mystery novels and most of her plays and short stories. I’ve even read two of her Mary Westmacott novels. (I can’t help but interject that I feel that one of those, Absent in the Spring is Mrs. Christie’s literary masterpiece.) I admire Mrs. Christie’s work enormously and am extremely gratefulRead more

A Recipe for Canned Corn Corn Chowder

Corn chowder is a wonderful thing. Although some of us would be ashamed to admit it, canned corn is a wonderful thing too. And, while a steaming bowl of chowder is most welcome in the winter, winter is precisely when corn is out of season. Whence the following recipe for canned corn corn chowder (which isn’t at all the same thing as canned corn chowder.) Although wordhandler.com isn’t a cooking site, culinary prose is well within our capabilities. The readerRead more

A Tale of Two Ripleys

Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley is the twisted tale of a paranoid sociopath who commits two murders, assumes one of his victim’s identities…and then gets away with it. Not only does Tom Ripley end the book in triumph: from his entrance at the very start of the novel, we’ve been rooting for him. The Talented Mr. Ripley is one of those tales in which an antihero carries the reader’s sympathy. Despite the fact that Ripley is aRead more