Two Hercule Poirot Short Stories by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie has the distinction of being the only crime writer who created two equally famous and revered characters – Miss Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot. I’ve read almost all the novels featuring both amateur sleuths, and I can’t say which character I like most. They’re so completely different; what they have in common is that they share an ability to solve complicated crimes, almost impossible for anyone else in the stories to solve. 

I’ve discovered that I haven’t read many of the short stories featuring the characters (and I don’t think they ever appeared in the same story or novel). But I started stumbling over them – a link, an ad, something – and I know see that Christie did as well with her stories as she did with her novels.

 

Two recent Hercule Poirot stories I’ve read are The Incredible Theft and Problem at Sea.

 

The Incredible Theft was first published in 1937. It’s set in the classic country home of a lord with strong connections to the British Air Ministry. During a weekend gathering of friends and acquaintances, some significant plans for a new bomber are stolen. The problem is that everyone seems to be able to account for where they were when the theft happened. Solution: bring in M. Hercule Poirot, “that finny little foreigner,” to solve the case. And he does in a classic Agatha Christie fashion.

 

Agatha Christie

Problem at Sea was first published in 1939. A group of ocean voyagers are in route to Alexandria, Egypt, include M. Poirot. He watches all the conversations and interactions carefully, because something is clearly off. When a woman is found dead in her locked cabin, thee case seems to have no suspects at all; even Poirot heard her calling out, saying she was staying behind while others visited the port. But once again, he employs those “little gray cells” to solve the puzzle.

 

Both stories are approaching 90 years old, but it says something about Christie’s skill that they still sound almost contemporary. Each can be read in under 30 minutes, making them easy, quick entertainment.

 

Related:

“The Lamp” – A Ghost Story by Agatha Christie. 

Two Short Stories by Agatha Christie.

Two Miss Marple Short Stories by Agatha Christie.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The British Evacuation of New York and the Fate of Loyalist Americans – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.

 

Over a Century of Willa Cather – Bradley Birzer.

 

Blood on Our Hands – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

Stay Organized: Keep Track and Back Up Your Writing – Dean Wesley Smith.

 

Religion & Rhetoric: The Significance of Religion to the Patriot Cause in the American Revolution – Ben Powers at Emerging Revolutionary War Era. 

Accepting a Short Story Challenge

Like most if not all writers, I follow several writers who post and talk about the craft of writing. Like other writers, it’s helpful, encouraging, and instructive to see what others, Christian and non-Christian alike, are struggling with, learning, sharing, and figuring out. 

I published my last book in late 2024.  What followed was period of exhaustion. Writing that book had been an intense experience; the research had begun in 2016 and continued through the writing of two other novels and deepened in the final two years. The published book includes nine pages of bibliography. I’d never written historical fiction before, and it was one of the most intense writing experiences of my life. Through the process, my respect for writers of historical fiction grew exponentially. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

 

Top photograph by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Morning Desire – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

Are You Looking for Magic? – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

Dorothy Sayers Is the Answer to John Dewey – Jesse Sumpter at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

A Record of Writer’s Rush – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

Two Short Story Collections Well Worth Reading

My interest in reading, and writing, short stories has been growing for years. It started with the five Dancing Priest novels, which provided an outlet for sections that were cut, or exploring ideas that were good in themselves but didn’t fit the larger story. In some cases, they were small spinoffs from that larger story. A few have appeared online; most have not. 

But I found myself becoming increasingly interested in the short form of writing fiction. I’ve written several for the Cultivating Project. Recently, I began participating in a short story writing project, a simple, self-reporting tally every week of stories and word count (more on that next week).

 

I’ve also spent more time reading short story collections. Two recent ones that were well worth the time, more than worth the time, in fact, are Here It Snows in June by Eric Cyr and 13 Short Stories of Longing by Adam Nettesheim. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Flannery O’Connor’s Hollow Men – Mitchell Kalpakgian at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Great Books for You and for Me – Nadya Williams at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Dante’s Global Vision: Seeing & Being Seen in the Divine Comedy – Peter Kalkavage at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The meaning of Ceuta – Jack Davey at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Drawing Rooms of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

"White Week and Other Stories" by Wojciech Chmielewski

The Polish writer Wojciech Chmielewski isn’t exactly a household name in America, and for a very good reason. Up to now, none of his writing has been published in English. Wiseblood Books has changed that with the publication of White Week and Other Stories, translated by Katarzyna Bylow.  

Chmielewski is best known in Poland for his short stories, which have won awards in his home country. But he’s also an essayist, literary critic, and playwright for Polich Radio Theatre. This collection of stories, many previously published in Polish literary journals and anthologies. Re largely about Warsaw, a Warsaw that is there and the city that used to be. (Much of the city was destroyed during World War II and then rebuilt under communist rule.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Brotherhood of the Byline: Andrew and Lee Child on Jack Reacher, Past and Present – John Valeri at CrimeReads.

 

Inside the Workings of Joel J. Miller’s The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future – Suzanne Smith at Front Porch Republic.

 

The Nights of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

The Value of Writing Short Stories

In the seven months since my last novel Brookhaven was published, I’ve been focused on talking about it, writing about it, publicizing it, sending out copies, and all the usual things you do to promote your book. I haven’t done much writing of anything else or anything new. An idea for a new novel has been percolating in my mind, but nothing has seen the light of day. 

Yet the desire to write is there; it seems like it’s always there. I’ve had to stifle it a bit to keep focused on marketing Brookhaven. 

 

I was able to scratch the writing itch by what resulted from a coincidence.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Are These Mothers Starting a Revolt in England? – Dominic Green at The Free Press. 

 

At the London Library – Spitalfields Life.

 

Murders for August – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Simple Truth About the War in Gaza – Coleman Hughes at The Fre Press.

 

Why Would Media Report on Public Broadcasting Funding and Ignore their Financial Records? – Matt Taibbi at The Free Press.

 

“Spare Us Yet: And Other Stories” by Lucas Smith

Faith meets reality. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out as you expect it to, or as you think it should. 

Growing up in a culture that’s saturated Catholic (like New Orleans was), even we non-Catholics were aware of the impact and reach of the church. Ash Wednesday felt weird when you were one of the few in public school with a clean forehead. You lined up for your polio vaccine (sugar cube style) at the local Catholic school. Most of the weddings and funerals you attended were Catholic, and you typically found more food at funerals than wedding receptions. Almost all your neighborhood friends were Catholic. You took you SAT tests at the Catholic high school. Catholic was familiar; Catholic was normal.

 

Perhaps this is why I felt completely at home with Spare Us Yet, the collection of short stories by Lucas Smith. To call them Catholic stories would be an act of misdirection. Certainly, they all have the sense of faith, and a few even concerns priests, religious holidays, and observances. But they are not stories of faith as taught in seminary or theology textbooks as they are stories of faith lived out in day-to-day life.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

One Final Newspaper Roll Call – Neil Chatelain at Emerging Civil War.

 

You Can Have This Heart to Break – Patti Callahan Henry at Stories Are My Thing.

 

Hypergraphia: On Prolific Writers and the Persistent Need to Produce – Ed Simon at Literary Hub.

 

When the Stranger Becomes the Scourge: Lessons for Localists from Wuthering Heights – Raleigh Adams at Front Porch Republic.

 

“There Will Never Be Another Battle” – Kevin Pawlak at Emerging Civil War.

“Cassandra’s Shadow: Stories” by M. Brosh

As I read Cassandra’s Shadow: Stories by M. Brosh, I had to keep checking to make sure I was reading fiction. After seeing about such recent and real-life reports like exploding pagers and drone factories secretly smuggled into Iran, Brosh’s stories seemed like they were thinly disguised versions of actual events. 

Fiction they are. But they are also based in fact, true events on how the Israeli secret service Mossad operates.

 

The 33 stories are set in a variety of locations – Jerusalem, Vienna, Paris, Syria, an airplane flight from Istanbul to Beijing, and more. Some 23 of the stories are actually a connected narrative, resembling a novella rather than a set of stories. But all of them describe situations that are entirely believable and likely happened. 

 

Operatives for the Organization, which sounds like a nickname for Mossad, undertake a variety of operations. But not all of them are directly involved. The main narrative, in fact, begins with an analyst noticing something odd – a train wreck in North Korea that resulted in a significant explosion and the deaths of people who had Syrian names. What is eventually discovered is that Syria has been using North Korean scientists to build a nuclear weapon on Syrian soil. The questions become what to do about it, and how to do it. And it’s a riveting account.

 

M. Brosh

The stories continue. An assassination in Damascus. An Iranian ship bringing arms to Hamas in Gaza. The targeting of a nuclear specialist at Tehran University. And more. Each story is told in almost understated way; this is, after all, what these men and women do on a daily basis for their work. The amount of planning and detail work is often staggering, but then I reminded myself, of how much planning and detail work must have gone into the exploding pagers and walkie-talkie devices across Lebanon in September of 2024.

 

The author includes an afterword about Europe and the fight against terrorism, describing how terrorists exploit the very foundations of European democracy.

 

Brosh lives on a kibbutz in central Israel. This is his first publication, and it is startling and sobering. Yes, you’re reading short stories, but you know it is fiction grounded in fact. And you realize what a dangerous place this world has become.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism – Aaron Renn at Compact Magazine.

 

27 Notes on Growing Old(er) – Ian Leslie at The Ruffian.

 

Murders for July – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

Frances Wilson: T.S. Eliot is stealing my baked beans – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

The War on Cliché – Christopher Gage at Oxford Sour. 

"Echoes of Hemingway: An Anthology"

In early May, I was reading A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Coincidentally, a writer named Harvey Stanbrough announced a writing contest for short stories inspired by any work of Hemingway's.

This must be a sign, I thought; I'm right in the thick of what's known as the great love story of World War I. 

 

I wrote a story and submitted it. It wasn't one of the stories chosen as top 3 (with a little prize money) but it was chosen to be in the e-book anthology, "Echoes of Hemingway." 

The title of my story is "Sonnets to Psalms," and it's about what happens to the main character in A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry, after the war ends. The title comes from a sonnet written in 1590 by George Peal, which some literary critics believe inspired Hemingway to write his World War I story. The sonnet’s title: “A Farewell to Arms.”

Then it became a matter of fitting pieces together – the town of Montreux, Switzerland, where Frederick and Catherine lived; an abbey not too far away; and some basic research.

The anthology contains 20 stories by 13 writers (a few overachievers wrote more than one story), and it has some very fine short stories covering a surprising number of genres. My own story would be categorized as general or historical fiction.

You can find more information about the anthology at https://payhip.com/b/3ibI5, and it will be available on the various book sites July 12. It can be pre-ordered at Amazon or at Books2Read. And it’s available right now at Harvey’s web site.

I’d never done this with a short story before, and it was actually a lot of fun.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

How Medieval Monks and Scribes Helped Preserve Classical Culture – Bernd Roeck at Literary Hub.

 

Eleanor Crow’s Falling Light (artwork) – Spitalfields Life.

 

A Writer for Our Times: Why John le Carre’s Work Remains More Essential Than Ever – Rav Grewal-Kok at Literary Hub.

 

"The Collected Breece D'J Pancake"

Up to a point, the similarities between John Kennedy Toole and Breece D’J Pancake are uncanny. 

Toole (1937-1969) wrote two novels. The first was The Neon Bible, which was published a decade after the second novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Both received repeated rejections from publishers. Toole would eventually commit suicide in 1969. His mother, Thelma, was determined to see A Confederacy of Dunces published, and she pestered publishers and writers for years, finally wearing down Walker Percy who read it and was blown away. It took Percy three years to find a publisher, and it was LSU Press. A Confederacy of Dunces was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

 

Pancake (an unusual but real last name) wrote 12 short stories and a few fragments of others. Born in 1952 in West Virginia, he managed to graduate from Marshall University. and taught at two military academies. He enrolled in the creative program at the University of Virginia, where he sensed a “class” consciousness between those who held only a B.A. degree and those who had more advanced degrees. But Pancake was the one selling stories to The Atlantic, which made a typographic error when they printed his stories, changing his middle initials “D.J.” to D’J; he kept it. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The American West – Writing Advice from John Steinbeck – William Groneman at Cowboy State Daily.

 

Tariffs in American History – John Steele Gordon at Imprimis / Hillsdale College.

 

At Dr. Johnson’s House – Spitalfields Life.

 

“To Go on Living: Stories” by Narine Abgaryan

To understand the short stories of Narine Abgaryan in To Go On Living, I realized rather quickly that I had to learn more about a conflict I’d never heard of. I was familiar with the genocide of the Armenian people by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. That included the murders of more than a million Armenians, forced Islamization of women and children, and death marches into the Syrian desert.  

But Abgaryan’s stories seemed based on something far more recent. And they are – what’s known as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The roots lie in the old Russian and Soviet empires and what happened when the communist Soviet regime fell. Like many other regions, that of Armenia and Azerbaijan featured a mingling of ethnic peoples. 

 

Historically, the Russians had favored the Azerbaijanis. The region of Nagorno-Karabakh contained mostly ethnic Armenians, surrounded by seven districts containing mostly Azerbanjanis. In 1988, a referendum in Nagorno-Karabakh was held to transfer the region to Soviet Armenia, and violence erupted between the two ethnic groups. Once the Soviet Union dissolved, the violence became all-out war, ending in 1994. 

 

Two decades of relative if uneasy peace followed, until 2020, when conflict erupted again. Three years later, the victorious Azerbaijanis took control of Nagorno-Karabakh. In both wars, border towns suffered. Berd, in northeastern Armenia, was one such border town. And Berd is largely the setting where Abgaryan’s short stories are largely set. Collectively, they raise the question of how people survive war, deaths of family members and friends, and destruction of their homes and livelihoods. 

 

And the individual stories do need to be read collectively, with many of them involving the same families and characters. The title answers the question for you: you survive the destruction wrought by war when you go on living.

 

Some of the stories are set during the war, while others are after the war. A woman attends the funeral of her brother, only to return home to find her house destroyed. A man and his son travel like they usually do for their business, and they never return home. Families are cut off from each other. A bus filled with people is hit by a mortar shell; half of the passengers die. A young woman spends her time anticipating the evening of each day; nothing else matters. A man sitting on the stoop of his house is killed by a projectile. 

 

Narine Abgaryan

Lives are disrupted, people die, children are maimed, injured, and mentally stricken. And yet, life goes on. Abgaryan finds survival and resilience in customs, culture, and even the food that’s prepared and eaten. The familiar and the customary survive war and destruction. 

 

The 32 stories, translated by Margarit Ordukhanyan and Zara Torlone, ae short and succinct, amplifying their impact. They often surprise and horrify, but Abgaryan isn’t writing about the destruction of people’s lives  as she is their  continuation.

 

Abgaryan was born in Berd. She’s published numerous books which collectively have sold more than a million copies. Three Apples Fall from the Sky won the Leo Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana Award and an English PEN Award, and a trilogy has been filmed as a television series. She lives in Armenia and Germany. Ordukhanyan is based in New York and translates both her native Armenian and Russian into English. Torlone is also a native of Armenia and a professor of Classics at Miami University in Ohio.

 

To Go On Living tells a story of war and destruction, yes. But it also tells a story of hope.

 

Map by Golden - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The dark yellow area is Nagarno-Karabakh; the small red dot in northern Armenia represents Berd.

Some Monday Readings

 

Conservation on mysterious Vermeer painting reveal it may have been his final work – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.

 

How “Tesla Takedown” Activists Fool the Public – Christopher Ruge and David Reaboi.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagorno-Karabakh_conflict

 

Up Close with the Beauty of Gatsby – Emma Heath at The Metropolitan Review.

 

Seeking the Grail – Andrew Henry at The Saxon Cross.

Some Christmas Readings – Dec. 25, 2024

The Darkness Does Not Win – Kevin DeYoung at Clearly Reformed. 

The Last Silent Night and the Silver-Haired Saints – Doug Spurling.

 

“Christ’s Nativity,” poem by Henry Vaughn – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Christmas Carol – poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

We Three Kings – Warren Peel at Gentle Reformation.

 

Centerpoint Poetry and Music for Christmas, via Jeff Johnson. 

 

Seven Surprises of the First Christmas – David Mathis at Desiring God. 

 

Are the Origins of Christmas Really Pagan? – Kenneth Calvert at Hillsdale College.

 

A Leprechaun for Christmas (Short Story) – Dancing Priest.

 

Christmas Oranges (Short Story) – Cultivating Oaks Press.

 

Three Christmas Sonnets – Phillip Whidden at Society of Classical Poets.

Jupiter Harmon's Christmas Poem - essay by Michael Curtis at Society of Classical Poets.

The Shop of Ghosts - short story by G.K. Chesterton at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

When All the Earth in Darkness Sleeps – Frank LaRocca & James Matthew Wilson

 Artwork: Star of the Night, etching (circa 1651) by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669); St. Louis Art Museum.

"The Last Waltz in Zurich" by Amir Tomer

Some years (decades) back, I discovered the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, and his stories had a collective purpose: to keep alive and commemorate the Yiddish culture of Europe, especially Poland, that had been destroyed by the Nazis in World War II. I was fascinated. I knew nothing of the world he was describing. It was full of folklore, magic, quirks, twists, the expected and unexpected, dreams, nightmares, and humor.  

I’d not read anything like these stories until The Last Waltz to Zurich and Other Stories by Amir Tomer. Tomer’s stories are not about Yiddish culture in Poland. Instead, they are about contemporary culture in Israel. And yet there is same sense of magic and twists, dreams and nightmares, and a very wry sense of humor that I found in the Singer stories. 

 

A man wakes up in the hospital after an automobile accident; he’s missing an eye, but the eye is still watching at the accident scene. An oil painting becomes real life. A man runs into an old rival for his wife, is invited to meet the man’s wife, and discovers it’s his own. A milkman leads children astray. A Holocaust survivor remembers huddling with her friends. 

 

In the title story, a man is dancing with the woman he considers the most beautiful in the world, his wife, when she suddenly dies in his arms. Later, not wanting to live, he decides to go to Switzerland for a legal suicide. In another story, a soldier contemplates a proposal. In another, a convention hotel provides the opportunity for a professor to pursue a student, but life changes. And there’s a man who abandons his work promotion to take the time to wreak vengeance, and the man pursued by a lighthouse becoming a woman becoming something else. And a story of man preparing to die on the gallows, and his life flashes before him. 

 

Dr. Amir Tomer

The collection contains 20 stories in all, a few containing graphic scenes. Together, the stories describe people searching for what they think is happiness, or the ordinary suddenly becoming extraordinary – and threatening, or relationships that never quite work out the way they were expected. And each story contains a twist, an unexpected development, a narrative surprise that suddenly changes our understanding of what’s been happening. 

 

Tomer, a professor of software engineering, received three degrees in computer science and has worked in the defense industry in Israel. He established a software engineering department at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee and headed the department for more than a decade. The Last Waltz in Zurich is his second book. His first, a poetry collection titled Love Designer, was published in Hebrew in 2021.

 

The Last Waltz in Zurich and Other Stories is unsettling, surprising, full of twists and turns, and a highly entertaining read.

Note: The book will be released in the United States on Nov. 23.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

What Makes Good Historical Fiction? – George Garnett at History Today.

 

Meet the American who conjured up ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow’: Washington Irving, first US celebrity author – Kerry Byrne at Fox News.

 

What The Invisible Man Made Visible to Me – Renee Hale at Miller’s Book Review.

 

‘There was eye-watering fear’: Jon le Carre’s son on writing a new George Smiley novel – Alex Clark at The Guardian.

 

Horatio Nelson: The Darling Hero of England – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

"The Blackbird & Other Stories" by Sally Thomas

A little girl tries to lead a normal life – dance revues, school – while the shadow of her mother’s illness seems everywhere. If she focuses on dancing “The Blackbird,” she’ll be fine. 

A couple try to make sense of their grown son’s suicide, even if you can never really make sense of that kind of tragedy. Or you’re traveling with your grandparents, trying to escape, or deal with, a family breakup. Or a spouse dies, that “little cough” having turned into something fatal. Or your youngest child is born with a skin condition that essentially makes him allergic to sunlight, and you have to re-orient everything you know and do. Or you take refuge from your spouse’s beach house, the one in your family for three generations, the one containing memories of every childhood vacation. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Go On, Try It; The Semicolon Isn’t as Scary as You Think – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Writing without a platform – Brad East.

 

The kindest of ghosts: A new history of childhood reading is a treasure – Simon Evans at The Critic Magazine. 

 

Things Worth Remembering: Nothing is Lost Forever – Douglas Murray at The Free Press on playwright Tom Stoppard. 

 

A preview of the New World War I Memorial in DC – and why it will hit you hard – John Domen at WTOP.

Save Your Editorial Cuts and Deleted Scenes

I had several pieces of a novel-in-progress that I’d set aside from the manuscript. Two fell outside the overall timeline; I’d cut several others because, while they were interesting, detracted from the main flow of the story. One was most of an entire scene; one involved a character than I’d cut; and one simply had way too much detail for the short scene that it was. 

But I’d kept them all, saved in a file on my computer as well as in my own head.

 

I was also working as a contributing editor for an online magazine, published several times a year and each issue centered on a theme. The editor was seeking articles, poems, and stories for the Christmas issue, and I remembered one of my cut pieces from the novel-in-progress.

 

It was a Christmas story, but it needed a bit of work. I pulled it from its Word file on my computer and began to read, edit, revise, and write. It needed work; reading it now, I’d still do more revising. But I submitted it, and it was accepted and duly published. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog.

Photograph by Alexander Grey via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Writing for, Within, and Against the Market – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

 

Devilish Dwight in Division Command – Brian Kowell at Emerging Civil War.

 

Birds – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Loons of Colby Lake – poem by Michael Pietrack at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Lebanonization in the UK – Sam Bidwell at The Critic Magazine.

Two Short Stories by Louisa May Alcott

I’ve been reading stories and novels by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) to understand what the popular culture of the 1860s,1870s, and 1880s was like. I could call it research for my historical work-in-progress, and it is that, but it’s also become something more. 

Alcott first gained literary notice during the Civil War. In 1863, she published Hospital Sketches, a collection of stories about a volunteer’s experiences in a Washington, D.C., convalescent hospital for wounded Union soldiers. As serious as the subject was, Alcott also treated it with sympathetic humor, and she did it the right way by making herself the object of the jokes and comical situations. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: Louisa May Alcott about 1870.

 

Some Wednesday Readings

 

St. Olave’s, Hart Steet – A London Inheritance.

 

The Frenchman Who Dreamed Up the Olympics – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

Dealing with Crime – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian.

 

Fourteenth Amendment Day (July 28): Horace Flack, Champion of This Famous Reconstruction Amendment, Seems to Have Evolved in His Views of the Civil War and Its Aftermath – Max Longley at Emerging Civil War.

 

All About Creating Mysteries in a Novel – Nathan Bransford.