“Cards on the Table” (1936) starts with a weird premise and a weird hobby: A socialite, Mr. Shaitana, likes to throw parties where he invites
I was ambivalent about reading “Rising Sun” (1992), since I’m mainly into Michael Crichton for his sci-fi works. But I found it thoroughly engrossing as
“Murder in Mesopotamia” (1936) is entertaining, but it doesn’t hold up to a close analysis the way Agatha Christie’s top-shelf novels do. In a way,
In the late-1990s gamut of “mysterious alien object/message” movies, “Contact” (1997) is the mainstream one – in the best sense of that term. You can
The layperson knows Michael Crichton’s first novel as being “The Andromeda Strain” (1969), but his first published novel was actually “Odds On” (1966). He wrote
Hercule Poirot is better known for solving murders on trains and riverboats, but he also solves a killing on an airplane (or “aeroplane,” by the
“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) kicked off nearly a decade of cerebral sci-fi that didn’t end until “Star Wars” premiered in 1977. Members of the
There are two types of mystery readers: Those who view the book as a puzzle they must solve, and those who read it for the
Most Michael Crichton novels have an immediate hook, which is often right there in the title, or at least the one-sentence description: “The Andromeda Strain”
Like “The Mysterious Mr. Quin,” “Parker Pyne Investigates” (1934) is a one-off collection of episodic short stories that launches a new and unusual investigator. The