Archived Mystery Review: GEORGE BAGBY – Murder Calling “50”.

GEORGE BAGBY – Murder Calling “50”. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942. History books are fine, but they don’t tell the whole story. The same pieces of personal history may occur for millions of people everyday, events that affect their lives many times over, but if they make the history books (and almost none of them do), they’re squeezed into a short footnote (at best a small paragraph or two), so children a generation or so later hardly have a chance to know anything about it. Personal diaries and mystery stories, that’s the only way some important things will ever remembered. A case in point: this book (of course) about the air raid drills and blackouts that took place in New York City (and probably all up and down the East Coast; California was looking another direction). If you didn’t live through them, who remembers anything about them today? Even the title this book no longer has any significance to anyone any more. Air raid wardens and civil defense personnel had to spread…