Dean Street December

 After an up and down (or rather, a down and up) year of mystery reading, in early November  I was introduced to a new word and a new concept and a new challenge. The new word and new concept were new only to me, of course - middlebrow. I'd never heard the word before noticing it crop up a lot on Dean Street Press's Twitter feed, mostly courtesy of Scott, aka Furrowed Middlebrow 

 His vigorous advocacy of female middlebrow authors was beginning to intrigue me when Liz Dexter   shared an inspired idea for a December reading challenge. She suggested a Dean Street December, a month devoted to reading books published by Dean Street Press.  Since I've enjoyed so many DSP books this year, the idea of reading more while broadening the range of authors and genres was too good to pass up, so here I am.  

One of the things I've learned from starting Christopher Bush's Ludovic Travers series in particular, and also Alice Campbell's works (another DSP winner!) is that books of that era are often much more enjoyable read at a more leisurely pace. So for my Dean Street December, I've selected the 27 books shown in the image below to read over the month, which represents a significant slowdown of reading pace from my year to date. And since I owned exactly none of the non-mystery books shown before deciding on the challenge, they represent a seasonally appropriate donation to DSP! 😁

 I plan to read the books in the left-to-right order of that screenshot, mixing up mysteries from Flynn, Vivian and Bush with middlebrow works mostly from Elizabeth Fair and D. E. Stevenson. Once again, profound thanks to Steve Barge for Brian Flynn and to  Curtis Evans for Christopher Bush and Francis Vivian.

  As an avid user and endorser of The StoryGraph, I'll be posting all my reviews there, but will also update this page with a link to the reviews as I finish each book. The slower required reading rate should allow me to give more attention to the reviews.

December is nearly 3 hours old here as I type this, and the first entry for my Dean Street December is The Orange Axe  by Brian Flynn, the ninth Anthony Bathurst mystery. I'm hopeful of another fun read, as the setup is one I've never come across before - the murderer could be any one of  six masked men of similar build. As usual, Steve Barge's introduction does a great job of building interest in the story.  Let the games begin! 

 

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