The Accomplice, first published in 1947 as part of the Inner Sanctum Suspense Specials, is a psychological crime thriller in the mode of Ruth Rendell or Patricia Highsmith. The plot centers on Hank Bewley, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, who meets an attractive young woman, Corrie Waters, and her breathtakingly handsome boyfriend, Lex Abbott. The events that transpire follow a sordid and depraved path to a shocking climax. Matthew Head is a pen-name for John E. Canaday ...

A missionary doctor is on the hunt for a killer in the Belgian Congo in this 1945 mystery series debut exploring WWII-era Colonial Africa.World War II is raging, but in this dusty backwater of the Belgian Congo, the biggest problem is finding a cold beer. That's the case, at least, for Hooper Taliaferro, a U.S. government gofer sent to Africa on a vague errand related to the war effort. What he finds at the failing Congo-Ruizi plantation won't help the Allies much. ...

Have you ever seen an abandoned house in the countryside and wondered how it came to be in such a state of disrepair? Have you ever looked at such a house from a distance and felt, for some unexplainable reason, that you really don’t want to go inside it? The house with two front doors is just such a house. In the summer of 1954 Peter Smith takes his best friend George Bedford on a typical schoolboys’s  adventure – even if at eighteen they might be a little old for ...

The author of The Devil in the Bush returns to Colonial Africa in a mystery that is "at once an absorbing whodunit and a distinguished novel of atmosphere" ( The New York Times).World War II is over but US gofer Hooper Taliaferro is still in Africa, typing up Uncle Sam's loose ends. The latest end is in Cabinda, a tiny Portuguese colony with gaily painted buildings and a history of slave-trading. Hoop should have a pleasant stay at the home of the ...

When a Belgian beauty dies in the Congo, "sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued Dr. Mary Finney" is on the case in this "witty, well-written" mystery from 1950 ( The New York Times).It doesn't take a lot to be the belle of the expat community in Leopoldville, a tiny outpost in the Belgian Congo. A pulse and a pair of pumps will do the trick. Liliane Morelli brought more than that to the party, but it apparently wasn't enough: She's still dead of what the doctor calls b...

A medical missionary in post-WWII Paris is out to solve the murder of a nightclub singer in this 1955 mystery by the author of The Devil in the Bush.Paris at the height of its post-War chic is a far cry from the African backwaters that Hoop Taliaferro has been calling home. But with his American charm and American dollars, he fits in anywhere. He especially fits in at the Flea Club, a naughty nightclub for people who have pretty tame ideas of naughty. The ...

Moving beyond narratives of female suppression, and exploring the critical potential of a diverse, distinguished repertoire, this Companion transforms received understanding of women composers. Organised thematically, and ranging beyond elite, Western genres, it explores the work of diverse female composers from medieval to modern times, besides the familiar headline names. The book's prologue traces the development of scholarship on women composers over the past five decades and the categ...

Howard Skempton has contributed to British musical life for more than half a century, as composer, performer and commentator. His music is characterised by simplicity yet sophistication and is appreciated by lay and specialist listeners in equal measure. Skempton studied in London with Cornelius Cardew in the late 1960s, co-founding the Scratch Orchestra, and has written over 600 pieces since then, informed by and informing compositional trends. His outputincludes pieces for solo piano, ac...

In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power. In the eyes of such critics, femininity—a newly emerging a...

Matthew Head explores the cultural meanings of Mozart's Turkish music in the composer's 18th-century context, in subsequent discourses of Mozart's significance for 'Western' culture, and in today's (not entirely) post-colonial world. Unpacking the ideological content of Mozart's numerous representations of Turkey and Turkish music, Head locates the composer's exoticisms in shifting power relations between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, and in an emerging orientalist project. At the same...

Recent scholarship has vanquished the traditional perception of nineteenth-century Britain as a musical wasteland. In addition to attempting more balanced assessments of the achievements of British composers of this period, scholars have begun to explore the web of reciprocal relationships between the societal, economic and cultural dynamics arising from the industrial revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the ever-changing contours of British music publishing, music consumption, concert li...

Have you ever been carried away by a piece of classical music? In this funny, evocative, personal eBook, previously published as ‘Music for the People: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Classical Music’, Gareth takes us on a journey of musical discovery that explains and entertains in equal measure.Have you ever been carried away by a piece of classical music? The sad song of a single violin might make us cry, but the idea of finding out more about classical music can often be intimida...