w ones left to read, combined with the difficulty of finding these remaining titles cheaply. But I got lucky on eBay earlier in the year and nabbed The Double Frame, which is the UK title for Knocked for a Loop. I have gone with the earliest publication date, which is the American one. It is the 10th John J. Malone mystery out of 13, and in 1958 The Spectator described it as ‘very fast and quite funny’. My edition is Black Dagger Crime, and it comes with a foreword by Peter Chambers. I was intrigued by this passage: ‘Educated privately, she grew up in the violent era of Capone and his ilk, but her work contains none of the blood-stained realities of those violent times. Certainly it is concerned with murder, extortion and general mayhem, but the manner in which it is relayed is light-hearted, far removed from the grisly “realism” of certain other interpreters. There is no dwelling on gruesome details, and we are not encouraged to linger at the scene. The impact on the leading players…
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