Carly’s Reviews > Gun in Cheek: An Affectionate Guide to the "Worst" in Mystery Fiction > Status Update

"'Dan Turner squalling,' I yeeped. 'Flag your diapers to Sylvia Hempstead's igloo. There's been a croaking.'"
--Robert Leslie Bellem, "Come Die for Me"

"The shock of the separation with Sue permeated through Bironico's senses. He wanted to lash out at these snotty women libbers, who poisoned the atmosphere with their hysterical hostility, and just think, Sue bought the crap, he concluded. His angry thoughts roamed all over the deck. He was a casualty in this war of liberation; and Sue was a willing rifle-person. The dumb bitch!"
William L. Rivera, Panic Walks Alone

"I wanted to see the murderer of that beautiful creature seated in the gas chamber. I wanted it so bad my saliva glands throbbed."
Michael Morgan, Decoy

"I sat beside her in the Traxton's Parisian Room and let the edges of my eyes siphon up the pleasure of her tall, slender figure in a blue evening gown which made a low-bridged criss-cross right above where the meat on a chicken is whitest."
Decoy, Michael Morgan

"Hope flared in her dark eyes as she grabbed the rope I had tossed to her drowning brain."
Naked Villainy, Carl G. Hodges

"She said slowly, working it out as she spoke, 'Then you were right and my nymphomania is psychical and not physioogical as I thought [...] But now--the compulsion is gone. It's been seventy hours since I drugged myself and I'm still sane. My mind hasn't cracked as I thought it would. Bread pills!"
--Bruce Elliott, You'll Die Laughing

Oh, you did not just call Barbara Michaels (aka Elizabeth Peters) a writer of Alternative Classics. Didn't you pick up on the fact that her books are an intentional spoof?

"The old woman's breasts were balanced over her folded hands like the loaded scales of justice waiting for her final judgment."
--Leslie Paige, Queen of Hearts

"Despite the best efforts of the feminist movement, [Gothic heroines] still faint at moments of high melodrama and are still prone to what Lee Wright [...] characterizes as 'the idiot heroine in the attic' syndrome; that is, when they encounter a [...] plot device that common sense tells them is fraught with danger, they invariably enter the room, or unlock the door, or do whatever else is contrary to logic."

"I know now that there must have been a touch of madness in me that raw October night as I went to Cemetery Key and the house of horror known as Stormhaven."
--Jennifer Hale, Stormhaven