The Daffodil Affair By Michael Innes

Inspector Appleby's aunt is most distressed when her horse, Daffodil - a somewhat half-witted animal with exceptional numerical skills - goes missing from her stable in Harrogate. Meanwhile, Hudspith is hot on the trail of an enigmatic young girl who has been whisked away to an unknown isle by a mysterious gentleman.

Successful minor poet, Philip Ploss, lives a peaceful existence in ideal surroundings, until his life is upset when he hears verses erroneously quoted as his own. Soon afterwards, he is found dead in the library with a copy of Dante's Purgatory open before him.

A Scotland Yard detective probes a string of strange disappearances and paranormal phenomena in this classic British mystery adventure. Insp. John Appleby has his hands full. It begins when his aunt’s horse, Daffodil, disappears from her stable in Harrogate. Meanwhile, Appleby’s colleague, Superintendent Hudspith, is searching for a missing young woman by the name of Lucy Rideout. But the most bizarre case is the vanishing of a supposedly haunted house in Bloomsbury. Working together, the puzzled policemen soon find the cases are connected. But what exactly is going on? The answer to that question lies with a madman in the Amazonian jungle . . . Praise for Michael Innes and Inspector Appleby “Innes is in a class by himself among detective story writers.” —The Times Literary Supplement “As farfetched and literary as Sayers.” —Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction “A first-rate piece of work, intelligent, well-written, elaborate and exciting. . . . Highly recommended.” —The Spectator on Hamlet, Revenge!

Appleby's End was where Detective Inspector John Appleby got off the train from Scotland Yard. But that was not the only coincidence. Why did Ranulph Raven's mysterious descendants make such a point of inviting Appleby to spend the night at their house?

P. D. James, the undisputed queen of mystery, gives us an intriguing, inspiring and idiosyncratic look at the genre she has spent her life perfecting. Examining mystery from top to bottom, beginning with such classics as Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, and then looking at such contemporary masters as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell, P. D. James goes right to the heart of the genre. Along the way she traces the lives and writing styles of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and many more. Here is P.D. James discussing detective fiction as social history, explaining its stylistic components, revealing her own writing process, and commenting on the recent resurgence of detective fiction in modern culture. It is a must have for the mystery connoisseur and casual fan alike.

In How to Kill a Dragon Calvert Watkins follows the continuum of poetic formulae in Indo-European languages, from Old Hittite to medieval Irish. He uses the comparative method to reconstruct traditional poetic formulae of considerable complexity that stretch as far back as the original common language. Thus, Watkins reveals the antiquity and tenacity of the Indo-European poetic tradition. Watkins begins this study with an introduction to the field of comparative Indo-European poetics; he explores the Saussurian notions of synchrony and diachrony, and locates the various Indo-European traditions and ideologies of the spoken word. Further, his overview presents case studies on the forms of verbal art, with selected texts drawn from Indic, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Hittite, Armenian, Celtic, and Germanic languages. In the remainder of the book, Watkins examines in detail the structure of the dragon/serpent-slaying myths, which recur in various guises throughout the Indo-European poetic tradition. He finds the "signature" formula for the myth--the divine hero who slays the serpent or overcomes adversaries--occurs in the same linguistic form in a wide range of sources and over millennia, including Old and Middle Iranian holy books, Greek epic, Celtic and Germanic sagas, down to Armenian oral folk epic of the last century. Watkins argues that this formula is the vehicle for the central theme of a proto-text, and a central part of the symbolic culture of speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language: the relation of humans to their universe, the values and expectations of their society. Therefore, he further argues, poetry was a social necessity for Indo- European society, where the poet could confer on patrons what they and their culture valued above all else: "imperishable fame."

Kriminalroman. Meredith's utydelige mumlen blev misforstået af kioskejeren og det førte inden dagen var omme til mord