#HappyPride! Have a queer meet-cute in the middle of stolen memory, a cultish family and its plans, and the King in Freaking Yellow.

It's a lot to handle, but Simon Night, PI, always closes the case.

ABOUT NATE SCOTT: by Ruthanne Reid. Buy now for $2.99:

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A Heart Full of Headstones – Reflections on Ian Rankin’s Rebus

I recently finished A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin, the twenty‑fourth novel in the long‑running series featuring the Edinburgh detective John Rebus. I came to the book for a very simple reason. Years ago, I watched the television adaptation starring Ken Stott, and for me he will always remain the epitome of Rebus. Stott captured that mixture of intelligence, stubbornness, and quiet weariness that seems to define the character.

One of the most remarkable things Ian Rankin has done with his long‑running series is something many writers avoid. He has allowed John Rebus to grow older. In many detective stories the central character remains almost unchanged across decades, as though time itself pauses for them. Rebus is different. Across twenty‑five novels we have watched him move through the seasons of life, carrying the marks of experience, family, regret, and persistence. Rankin has allowed his detective to age alongside his readers, and that may be one of the reasons the character feels so real.

Rebus is no longer the relentless detective of earlier years. Time has left its marks. He now faces health issues. He has a daughter and a granddaughter. The world around him has changed, and so has he. Yet, the core of the character remains. He maintains a stubborn determination to pursue what is right, even when he himself is deeply flawed. That is part of what makes Rebus so compelling. He is not heroic in the traditional sense. He makes mistakes, but there remains within him an unshakeable instinct to confront injustice.

Another aspect I found fascinating is the way Rankin situates the story during the COVID‑19 pandemic. Rather than ignoring that moment in history, he weaves it naturally into the background of the narrative. The pandemic becomes part of the atmosphere of the book shaping how people interact, how investigations unfold, and how the characters navigate an unsettled world. For readers who have followed the series for years, this adds a layer of realism. Rebus does not exist in a timeless fictional bubble. He lives in the same changing world that we do.

Readers who have just finished A Heart Full of Headstones will also notice that the story of Rebus is not yet finished. Rankin has continued the journey in the next novel, Midnight and Blue, reminding us that even after many years the tenacious spirit of Rebus still has more roads to travel. Sometimes the most enduring figures in fiction are not the flawless heroes, but the stubborn souls who keep searching for justice long after the world has grown complicated.

Rebecca

When Fiction Walks Beside History: The Girl in the Green Dress by Mariah Fredericks

Every once in a while a book surprises me. The Girl in the Green Dress by Mariah Fredericks was one of those books. I have been enjoying a number of mysteries lately, but this one offered something more than an engaging puzzle. It opened a doorway into the lively world of the Jazz Age and into the fascinating personality of Zelda Fitzgerald. Before long I found myself wandering through that glittering era of music, literature, and restless creativity.

The novel centres around the enigmatic figure of Zelda Fitzgerald, one of the most fascinating personalities of the early twentieth century and the wife of the celebrated writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda has long lived in the shadow of literary myth. She has been portrayed as muse, rival, victim, genius, and scandal all at once. Because of this, choosing her as a central character in a mystery novel is no small act of courage. Everyone, it seems, has a theory about Zelda.

Mariah Fredericks approaches her not as a symbol but as a living woman. She is sharp, perceptive, complicated, and vividly alive. That alone makes the novel intriguing. This was not merely a mystery story set loosely in the past. The author clearly did her homework. The atmosphere of the Jazz Age rises from the pages that spoke of the music, the glamour, and the restless energy of a generation determined to break away from old conventions. I felt as though I had been transported into that era with the swirl of parties, the creative ferment, the ambition and the fragility of a world racing toward modernity.

At its heart, this is still a mystery and a story meant to keep the reader turning pages. I found myself enjoying the playful tension between fact and fiction. Historical figures move alongside invented characters, and the boundaries between documented history and imaginative storytelling blur in an engaging way.

I do not often expect a mystery to carry such a strong sense of historical atmosphere, but this novel reminded me that good storytelling transcends genre. When research, imagination, and narrative energy come together, a book can open a window into another time while still delivering the pleasure of a well‑told tale. In many ways, The Girl in the Green Dress feels like stepping into the smoky glow of a Jazz Age nightclub where literature, scandal, music, and modern life were all colliding at once.

The title itself adds another layer of meaning. The image of the green dress seems almost symbolic of the era. In the literature of the 1920s, green often carried associations of longing and possibility. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, the famous green light across the water becomes a symbol of dreams just beyond reach. That colour has come to represent something essential about the Jazz Age imagination with its ambition, glamour, and restless energy. Seen in that light, the girl in the green dress feels less like a single figure and more like a symbol of the generation itself.

What stayed with me after finishing the book was not simply the mystery itself, but the reminder that history is filled with vibrant personalities whose stories continue to echo through literature. Zelda Fitzgerald remains one of those figures, still mysterious, still compelling, and still impossible to fully define. The Jazz Age may belong to the past, but through novels like this we can still glimpse its excitement, its daring spirit, and its complicated human drama.

Rebecca

Postscript: About the Author

Mariah Fredericks is known for writing historical mysteries that blend careful research with imaginative storytelling. She first gained recognition for her Jane Prescott series (I have not read any of these books) set in New York’s Gilded Age, where she explored the social worlds of earlier eras through the eyes of women navigating them. In The Girl in the Green Dress, Fredericks turns to the vibrant and turbulent Jazz Age, weaving a mystery around the compelling presence of Zelda Fitzgerald and inviting readers to step briefly into one of the most fascinating cultural moments of the twentieth century.

Batman has never been The World's Greatest Detective on The Big Screen.
https://mithrandirolorin.blogspot.com/2026/05/batman-has-never-been-worlds-greatest.html

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Raymond Chandler’s cannibalized stories

If I were asked to name my all-time favourite crime-fiction writer, I would struggle to place anyone above Raymond Chandler. In contemporary literature the one who comes closest is Peter Temple, who, like Chandler, took up the practice in middle age. There’s a lot to be said for it.

A late entrant to the fiction-writing game, Chandler completed seven novels in his lifetime; another one was finished posthumously. For readers it’s a very manageable total. I read the novels in my twenties and reread a few in my thirties.

I was less systematic with Chandler’s shorter work, with the result that I recently picked up an unread – and unusual – collection, Killer in the Rain, first published in 1964. Philip Durham, who was a professor of American literature at University of California, introduces this Penguin edition:

During his lifetime Raymond Chandler published twenty-three short stories. Yet of this relatively small output only fifteen are generally known to the reading public. For a quarter of a century the remaining eight have lain buried in the crumbling pages of old pulp magazines. And these eight stories are among his finest.

Killer in the Rain collects those eight stories. Curiously, though I had never read them before, I had what I described elsewhere (Mastodon; Bluesky) as a recurring experience of déjà lu: half-familiar lines, characters, and scenarios.

It turns out that Chandler ‘cannibalized’ these eight stories for his novels – he once said in a letter that he ‘won’t discard anything’ – and for that reason excluded them from collections published during his lifetime. This textual cannibalization has its own short paragraph on Wikipedia.

Repurposing one’s writing is a common practice. But it made Chandler uneasy, Durham writes, and he was able to justify it ‘only by leaving such stories buried, virtually unknown in the pages of the rapidly disappearing pulp magazines’. I also feel that it’s trickier in fiction than nonfiction. Durham again:

Turning short stories into cohesive novels tested the extent of Chandler’s skill. It meant combining and enlarging plots, maintaining a thematic consistency, blowing up scenes, and adapting, fusing, and adding characters.

Primary among the characters, of course, was Philip Marlowe, one of the great fictional detectives. For this creation Chandler drew on earlier protagonists, Killer in the Rain making visible the progression from a nameless first-person narrator to Carmady, John Dalmas, and John Evans.

Things were more complicated for secondary figures:

Of the twenty-one characters in The Big Sleep, seven were drawn directly from ‘The Curtain’, six were taken from ‘Killer in the Rain’, four were composites from the two stories, and four were new creations.

Perhaps most interestingly, at least from this editor’s point of view, is the expansion of entire scenes. One passage in ‘The Curtain’, set in a greenhouse, is about 1,100 words; in The Big Sleep it’s about 2,500. Durham presents the change in miniature, from the following forty-two words:

The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the glass house dripped. In the halflight enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.

to these eighty-two:

The air was thick, wet, steamy, and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish colour, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

He finds both passages ‘intense and vivid’ and notes how each achieves its effect: the first through terseness, the second through mood, hyperbole, and ‘striking similes’. Chandler assembled Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady in the Lake in similar fashion, with variations and twists on the original material.

After Chandler’s death in 1959, frequent calls for the publication of these ‘lost’ stories led eventually to Killer in the Rain, with Durham concluding that ‘there no longer seems any good reason why, provided their origin is clearly explained, they should be denied to the many thousands of Chandler’s readers’.

As well as being thoroughly enjoyable in their own right, the stories can be appreciated as raw material and inspiration for the better-known novels, and they offer a nice insight into an artful form of literary transmutation.

*

An etymological note on cannibalize: The OED dates it to 1655, in the sense ‘To overwhelm, destroy, or eat away at, as if by cannibalism; to crush or manipulate (a person)’. The more literal sense came along two centuries later.

The figurative sense ‘To absorb or destroy (something of a similar kind)’, used especially in business contexts, emerged in 1920; not until World War II do we finally see the word as used in the current post, defined as:

To use (something) as a source of parts or content for another of a similar kind; to take (a part) from one thing to use in another.

The first item the OED records as being thus ‘cannibalized’ is a wrecked French plane (‘parts are stripped from it for use on damaged Allied ships’ —Stars & Stripes, London edition, 26 Nov. 1942, caption). Cannibal itself is borrowed from Latin canibales and Spanish caníbal.

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The Late Night Call A Samantha Leary Short Story

https://wearewisethinkers.com/2026/03/16/the-late-night-call-a-samantha-leary-short-story/