You’re doubtless aware of the Vintage Mystery Bingo challenges offered by Bev Hankins over at My Reader’s Block, and with a full twelve months of blogging ahead of me in 2016 I’m declaring my entry into the latest of these, Vintage Mystery Cover Bingo.  I’ll allow Bev herself to explain:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to find as many objects on the scavenger hunt list as possible on the covers of the mystery books you read. As has been the case for Vintage Bingo you may play along in either the Golden or Silver Mystery Eras (or, for the more adventurous, both).

Being rather more of a Golden Age fan I’ll be doing the Golden Mystery era, though at my current rate of one review a week and a liberal helping of out-of-era locked room mysteries it remains to be seen how successful I shall be!

Nevertheless, I look forward to joining the ranks of Vintage Mystery Scavengers; it’s a great idea, and if anyone else fancies getting involved you have until the end of the year to sign up at Bev’s site.

Roll on my 2016 cover hunting…

Crime blogger Kate Jackson – whose fantastic work over at Cross-Examining Crime puts my own pale attempts at getting my thoughts online to shame – reviewed Kel Richards’ The Corpse in the Cellar a little while ago, which was serendipitous at the time because literally two or three days before I’d seen it in my local Waterstones.  The bland and slightly innocent-looking cover – intentionally or otherwise calling to mind the recent and deservedly successful British Library Crime Classics – and its billing as ‘A 1930s Murder Mystery’ got me excited for another resuscitated classic and forgotten author whose work was enjoying a reprint for the first time in 80 years on the back of the revival of interest in our beloved Golden Age.  Except that, upon inspection, Richards turns out to be a contemporary novelist and the book was in fact originally published earlier this year.

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I promise I’m not soapboxing and I promise I’m not going to shove down your throat every good cause that I come across, but I wanted to highlight that Waterstones’ Buy Books for Syria initiative starts in the UK today.  Effectively, you buy a qualifying book from a Waterstones store and the full price goes to Oxfam for them to put to use in their efforts to help those people fleeing the conflict in Syria.

Having seen first-hand some of those affected while in Greece this summer, the sheer scale of this crisis really does dwarf any attempt at a rational or an intelligent response.  It is tempting and entirely understandable to feel helpless and ineffective in the face of such magnitudes of pain and sorrow, and to therefore not feel that anything you can do – puny old you, all on your own – will make any difference at all.  If something like this will help give people a way to feel less bewildered, and so incentivise them into contributing, surely it must be a good thing.

That is all.