Ripley’s Regular Round-up

Among my online reading pleasures each month is to discover that British author and raconteur Mike Ripley has issued a new edition of his Shots column, “Getting Away with Murder.” The combination of news, nostalgia, and wit Ripley imparts is wholly satisfying.

Take his August appraisal of crime-fiction-related subjects, for instance. The contents encompass not only Ripley’s recollections of “the little-known 1968 thriller Counter Paradise by Nichol Fleming, Ian Fleming’s nephew,” but also word that Sunday Telegraph TV critic and spy novelist Philip Purser has died at age 95. There are notes, too, about Joan Lock’s non-fiction study of how real-life crime compared with fictional misdeeds during the so-called Golden Age of English detective fiction; Impact, the new thriller by Mark Mills, who previously penned The Information Officer and House of the Hanged; Robert Massie’s “Bordeaux Quartet” of thrillers, set in France during World War II; and new fiction from Vaseem Khan (The Lost Man of Bombay), Simon Mayo (Tick Tock), Ann Granger (Deadly Company), Ilaria Bernardini (The Girls Are Good), and others.

As Ripley informed us in his July column, and reminds us in this new one, there will be no September edition of “Getting Away with Murder,” as he’ll be away in Italy, “officiating at the annual Chianti Crime Festival.” We will all just have to be patient until his spirited return to Shots in mid-October.