Although some of the characters in the Margaret Millar mysteries I have read answer their own phones, many answer other people's phones instead: the telephones of older or more privileged relatives or those of their bosses. There's even a switchboard operator in the mix, along with a woman better known
In 1944, Mazo de la Roche published The Building of Jalna, nearly twenty years after she began to work with the Whiteoak family on the page. The beginning grew out of the middle, you might say. Jalna was actually written first, begun in 1925 and published in 1927: the fifth
I laid in with this story, while on a brief holiday in a small town outside Toronto. Outside, the sound of other people's everyday morning scurried past, but I was not required to be anywhere in particular that day. Salzburg Austria, Prison overlooking town [Piotr Bozyk, Click for credit]
My reading year began with Marina Endicott's New Year's Eve (2011), written with literacy front-of-mind; its vocabulary, structure and tone are meant to ease the passage for readers with varying degrees of ease reading in English. It begins simply: "The snow started before we left home." Despite its brevity ,
From the age of twenty-eight, Mavis Gallant lived and wrote in Europe, writing about "Canadians, Americans, Australians, Eastern and Western Europeans and their distinctive social and cultural milieux": she was "a citizen of the world". On the edge of beginning a deliberate reading and rereading of her stories, I peeked
