1991 autobiography. Hamper writes about his life working on the GM factory floor in Flint, Michigan.
2015-2016 police procedural, 23 episodes. A woman is found in a bag in Times Square: she's alive, naked, totally amnesiac, and covered with tattoos. The FBI investigates.
1939 classic English detective fiction; eighth of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Miss Campanula was killed by a booby-trapped piano, but was she really the intended victim?
Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's wilderness adventures and travel in a fantasy, or at least low-tech, setting.
1975 historical detective fiction; sixth of Lovesey's novels of Sergeant Cribb, policeman in Victorian London. Two thefts during séances conducted by the latest fashionable medium attract the attention of the police, but when the next séance ends in a death, mere spiritualism is clearly not the only deception going on.
Back to the boardgame café. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
2002 non-fiction: George Dyson, son of Freeman, recounts what can be told of the history of Project Orion, a plan to propel spacecraft with nuclear explosions.
1962 war, dir. Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki and others: IMDb / allmovie
The tale of the D-Day invasion in 1944, with a literal cast of thousands.
1975 detective fiction; sixth of Aird's novels of Inspector Sloan and Constable Crosby. Bill Fent, local landowner, died when his car hit another at a notorious corner… but he'd have been dead before morning anyway, from the poison in his system.
Steampunk Rally, designed by Orin Bishop, is a game of racing bizarre inventions… or a card-drafting, engine-building game that uses a racetrack merely as a way of keeping score.
1939/1950 collection of short mystery stories featuring Albert Campion.
2016, 10+2 episodes. If you're reading this you probably know what MythBusters was about, or you can go and find out.
1975 detective fiction; first of Dexter's novels of Inspector Morse. Two young women wait for the bus out of Oxford one night; one goes to hitch a ride, and her dead body is found the next day.
Grifters, designed by Jake Tlapek and David Fulton, is a hand-building game of crime syndicates for 2-4 players.
1995 mystery; first of Cutler's novels of Sophie Rivers, a teacher in a sixth-form college in Birmingham. Finding one of her students stabbed to death in the lift is bad enough; when her best friend dies in a way that seems plausibly accidental except to people who knew him well, Sophie knows she'll have to look into the situation herself.
2016 comedic fantasy manga adaptation in 10 episodes: Anidb, vt "Konosuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World!". Kazuma the shut-in dies in a traffic accident, but a goddess allows him to return to life in another world.
1930 thriller, second of the Saint series. In three loosely-linked novellas, the Saint takes on a succession of criminals.
The original GURPS Steampunk was published in 2000: both GURPS and steampunk have moved on since then. This first of what's planned to be a new series of PDF supplements does not replace that book, but "updates and extends" the GURPS treatment of this genre.
1975 detective fiction; first of Brett's novels of Charles Paris, ageing actor. A friend and occasional lover of Charles's has been dumped by her current sugar daddy, and she asks him to return some compromising photographs. But getting in touch is going to be something of a challenge.
My wife likes to listen to the radio at night. But Radio 4 is getting increasingly annoying (even I notice this; I don't listen to the speech, but I do pick up the vocal intonations, which over the last couple of years have become increasingly aggressive even when the subject is not one that would seem to deserve it) and the World Service is preferred.
2014 young adult science fiction, third in the Earth Girl trilogy. Jarra is Handicapped, unable to leave Earth for any of the colony worlds where most of society now happens, but she's also a famous hero. Which means she's now become a symbol, both for those who want to bring the Handicapped more into society and for those who resist that trend.
Back to this small quarterly boardgames convention in Watford. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
2014 non-fiction. Hannah Hart, youtuber, shares recipes and her philosophy of life.
2016, 6 episodes. FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully continue to look into strange occurrences.
1938 classic English detective fiction; seventh of Marsh's novels of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Someone's blackmailing London's high society as the Season begins, and Alleyn asks a friend who moves in those circles to look into it; murder will be done.
This third Dungeon Fantasy Monsters book deal with monsters of known mythic origins, and expands on the popular "magical mistakes" category of monster.
2011 historical mystery; fourth in Bradley's series about Flavia de Luce, young amateur sleuth in 1950s Britain. As Christmas approaches, Buckshaw is let to a film crew who'll be making The Cry of the Raven, starring the famous Phyllis Wyvern. But not all of the company will be leaving again.
In mid-October I went once more to Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, or "Essen" as it's generally known in the boardgaming world.
2014 science fiction. A nameless scholar of the Second Chinese Republic looks back from the year 2393 on the Penumbral Age that brought western civilisation to its close.
Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal.)