Product Description
These four digitally remastered "Goon Show" episodes - "The Childe Harolde Rewarde", "Queen Anne's Rain", "The Battle of Spion Kop" and "The Gold Plate Robbery" - were originally broadcast in 1958 and 1959. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Audiobook? Umm... it's just a standard double CD of comedy
Not sure what drugs Amazon are on here calling so many of these Goon Show double CD releases audiobooks.

Regardless this is volume 14 of the BBC Radio released Goon Show series where episodes are thrown out somewhat willy nilly - ie not in the chronological order that they were broadcast originally. Which for pedantic anoraks like me is a bit of an annoyance!

The four episodes (two per disc) are as follows;

The Childe Harolde Rewarde - a pretty good episode this, with lots of over the top British humour.

Queen Anne's Rain - A bit of an anonymous episode in my book this one.

The Battle of Spion Kop - A bit of a mystery reference for most people, even those with an interest in military history. I'll let you listen to it and figure out which war they are talking about. Not their finest 1/2 hour.

The Gold Plate Robber - More of the same anarchic humour with musical interludes to break the show up into thirds. Nothing to broadcast home about.

Only for completists this one. ... Read more

Product Description
These four late-1950s episodes of anarchic humour from The Goons feature guests appearances by George Chisholm, Kenneth Connor, Dick Emery and Graham Stark. ... Read more

Product Description
One of a series of digitally remastered collections of "Goon Show" episodes, including previously unreleased material. The episodes here are "Under Two Floorboards", "The Sinking of Westminster Pier", "The Yehti" and "The Mysterious Punch-up-the-Conker". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

1950's British comedy that was highly influential
With a style that bordered somewhat on having no style The Goon Show was broadcast on the radio in Britain and elsewhere from the 1950's onwards, being repeated relentlessly. I mean, I remember listening to reruns on the ABC network in Australia in the early 90's and for all I know they may still be playing it.

Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe combine to take their parts in four 1/2 hour episodes spread over two CD's here and this is a particularly strong volume of episodes. Under Two Floorboards is quite fun, The Sinking of the Westminster Pier is also a solid episode and The Yehti is really quite a good example of how the troupe could put together a solid half hour of comedy that was anarchic enough to add to the fun but also linear enough to have a viable plot. The collection ends with The Mysterious Punch-up-the-conker episode which is a fine way to round out this slice of now quite vintage, vintage British comedy. ... Read more

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Product Description
In October 1972 the Goons reassembled to perform an hour-long show to mark the BBC's 50th anniversary. The show is included on these cassettes, together with the 1991 broadcast which celebrated the 40th anniversary of "The Goon Show", and interviews and other material. ... Read more

Product Description
The Bloodhounds of Bath is a society that meets in a crypt to discuss crime novels. To their latest recruit they are simply a gaggle of dotty misfits, until one of them reveals that he is in possession of one of the world's most valuable stamps, recently stonlen from the Postal Museum. Then theft is overtaken by murder when the corpse of one of the Bloodhounds is found in a locked houseboat, with the only key in the possession of a man with a perfect alibi. Burly detective Peter Diamond, head of the murder squad in Bath, finds himself embroiled in a mystery that in more than one sense evokes the classic crime puzzles of John Dickson Carr.Amazon.com Review
Peter Diamond of the Bath Police returns in the fourthinstallment in this marvelous detective series. The plot for thismystery is well thought-out and cleverly developed with puzzling turnsthat keep you guessing. A rare stamp is stolen from a museum, only toappear between the pages of a mystery book under consideration by agroup of wing-chair sleuths known as the Bloodhounds. The intriguedeepens when one of the mystery buffs winds up dead. The cat-and-mousegame plays out with plenty of twists and turns. Mystery lovers willenjoy the debates over classic mystery plots that the Bloodhoundsengage in, and the careful reader will wisely follow them to gleanclues to solving the mystery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Very good puzzle, slightly confusing lead-up to the resolution
First Sentence:Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond was suffering in the rear seat of a police car scorching toward Bath along the Keynsham bypass with the headlamps on full beam, blue light pulsing and siren wailing.

Peter Diamond is back with the Bath police as a DS in charge of homicide. The media and police receive a poem which seems to indicate that a valuable painting, in the town's museum, by Turner will be stolen.Instead, it is the theft of a Penny Black, one of the world's most valuable stamps.The stamp turns up in the possession of a member of the town's mystery club, "The Blookhounds," and the body of another of the group's ends up on the suspect's boat.

Lovesey's wry humor and use of metaphors is delightful.It is a wonderful send-up of book groups and on-line groups, and I thoroughly enjoyed the all the references to mystery authors and their books.

Lovesey provides a very full construction of each character in very few works.He accurately depicts the pettiness, jealousy and fight for power which seem to be part of any group of people.He clearly exemplifies the tendency of those who are insecure to public degrade others in order to feel better about themselves.

Diamond is a delightful character; he can seem brusque, yet is aware of his flaws and can be kind.I am particularly taken with his very understanding wife, Stephanie, and his young policewoman, Julie Hargraves.

The story provides some interesting, amusing, and lesser known, history about Bath.The inclusion of those small details adds richness to the setting and a variance from the common inclusion of the Roman Baths.It is not all lightness, however, as there is murder and deception.As a John Dickson Carr fan, I found the set up of doing a locked-room, in this case boat, mystery and learning the solution to be fascinating.

The plot was filled with red herrings and twists; so much so, I found the lead-up to the resolution a bit confusing, which caused this to not be my favorite book in the series.I do, however, like the characters enough that I shall continue with the series.

BLOODHOUNDS (Pol Proc-Peter Diamond-Bath, UK-Cont) - G+
Lovesey, Peter - 4th in series
The Mysterious Press, ©1996, US Hardcover - ISBN:0892966459

Have enjoyed the entire series!
I came upon Lovesey quite by accident & have been pleasantly surprised & entertained. I have now read all 8 of the series featuring the curmudgeonly Inspector Peter Diamond & they make for a quick, enjoyable romp. These are not taunt thrillers but tongue-in-cheek good old fashioned murder mysteries, set in Bath, England.Diamond & his team solve their puzzles one piece at a time in the way good Policemen do.I heartily recommend these engaging stories.

Bloodhounds
Bloodhounds (Soho Crime) Very entertaining!A "locked room murder" with a very interesting cast of characters.If you love mysteries, give it a try.

Great logical mystery
This book is a defense of mystery novels being not reality but logical puzzles for those who enjoy thinking. At that, it's a wonderful success. All the clues are on the table and it's up to the reader to decipher them. The text is fluid, although there's a bit much of it, and while characters are stiff their essential traits are behavioral and those are represented well. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy mysteries in the Christie/Hammett tradition of mind games and forays into discrete logic.

No one writing today does locked room mysteries as good as P
The Bloodhounds are a weird mystery fan group who meet in strange places like crypts to hold discussions.Just prior to tonight's meeting Milo finds a rare Penny Black stamp inside a John Dickson Carr novel; the stamp was recently stolen from the Postal Museum.Not long afterward, Milo is found dead in his locked riverboat and the stamp is missing.

The killer sends riddles to the police and the media driving an already irate Bath Detective Superintendent Diamond up a wall while his staff interviews the other members of the Bloodhounds.Diamond soon comes up with a theory on how the killer escaped the locked riverboat puzzle, but that fails to get him any closer to identifying the culprit making him wonder if his hypothesis is sending him down the wrong path.

Paying homage to John Dickson Carr, no one writing today does locked room mysteries as good as Peter Lovesey does.In his fourth Diamond police procedural (see THE LAST DETECTIVE, DIAMOND SOLITAIRE, and THE SUMMONS) is a terrific tale that grips readers as the cops question the obsessed Bloodhounds only to uncover all sorts of personal secrets, but no murder motive as none seems like a thief.Diamond remains cantankerous perhaps more so this time because the serial killer is laughing in public at his foibles.Besides the locked room, Mr. Lovesey pulls a brilliant sleight of the hand that will fool and satiate the audience.

Harriet Klausner
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Product Description
If you are looking for foggy, dimly lit alleys echoing with the click-clack of a woman's high-heeled shoes, where a mook stiffs you for a drink, and where a glance can kill, look no further. This is the best in contemporary Canadian noir fiction. Sixteen stories from both award-winning veteran crime writers and a new generation of gritty urban authors, this collection boldly defies the notion that Canadians are nicer than everyone else. Isolation, anxiety, and survival -- staple themes of Canadian literature -- are the foundations of noir. These powerful narratives feature street-savvy protagonists and corrupt characters struggling to find order, meaning, or maybe even redemption in a world of corruption, lust, mystery, and revenge. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Noir in the Great White North
Iced provides a peek into the dark recesses of the Great White North that have hitherto been passed over for the bright red uniforms of the Mounted Police. But once you get past the tourist shots, Canada shows itself to be just another stretch of property to be found along the mean streets of hardboiled literature. Great read overall. Particularly memorable is "Avenging Miriam" by Peter Sellers and James Powell's contemplative "Winter Hiatus". ... Read more

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There is something in Lake Tahoe California and a group of young people find out the hard way. With the help of a young police officer, they grudgingly set out to uncover the Mystory of the Monster in the lake. ... Read more

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The fifth novel featuring Peter Diamond, dinosaur of the Bath CID. Frustrated by the low murder rate in the city, he is glad to have a case to get his teeth into when the body of woman is found in the garden of flat after a party. It is unclear if she slipped, jumped or was pushed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Have enjoyed the entire series!
I came upon Lovesey quite by accident & have been pleasantly surprised & entertained. I have now read all 8 of the series featuring the curmudgeonly Inspector Peter Diamond & they make for a quick, enjoyable romp. These are not taunt thrillers but tongue-in-cheek good old fashioned murder mysteries, set in Bath, England.Diamond & his team solve their puzzles one piece at a time in the way good Policemen do.I heartily recommend these engaging stories.

Fun Read--4+ stars
This is my favorite Lovesey of the 4 I've read so far.They are all pretty easy to take--some action but mostly puzzlers with a police procedural flavor.The protagonist tends to pull apparently separate mysteries together in solving them.I think whether one likes the Detective Superintendent (DS) Diamond books depends a lot on the characters.Diamond himself is self-centered and sometimes nasty but once in a while can be quite sympathetic.In this particular book there is a dramatic change in personnel (not a big surprise, I think), but the "guest" characters were more interesting IMHO.The perpetrator is difficult to envision as real though it does make for a surprise ending--I find it hard to see how any reader could have figured out the mystery--not a fair "Agatha" type book.However, the book is quite enjoyable--I esp. liked the character Ada who was a riot!The ending gets rather exciting--trite perhaps--but exciting nonetheless.I enjoyed the book quite a bit.

Cleanly written police procedural.
This was my first Peter Diamond novel, and I immediately liked the character. Despite a surfeit of gruff and unlikeable middle aged English detectives, Diamond still stands out as well-drawn and interesting.

At the beginning of the book, the only threat facing Diamond is that he might die of boredom. He starts investigating apparent suicides in Bath out of a lack of more obvious murders to pursue. When his investigation ties in with the mysterious case of the amnesiac found wandering the roads of Bath, his life gets rather more exciting than he might have wanted.

I had some issues with the way that the two major threads of the story were knitted together. I felt as though this affected the pacing-- particularly in the second half of the novel. Still, I liked both threads and the book kept me reading.

Recommended for fans of British police procedurals. I will be picking up another in the series when I get the chance.

One of my favorites
UPON A DARK NIGHT is one of my favorites in the Peter Diamond series.In spite of his gruff, rather unloveable personality, Peter Diamond has an amazing ability to tease out the link between two apparently unrelated deaths, a farmer, who apparently killed himself with a shotgun and a woman, who jumped/fell off of the roof of a building. While everyone else in the department figures, including his rival, John Wigfall, concludes each died by suicide, Diamond comes to believe that the cause of death is not so obvious.Complicating the cases is a missing person named Rose, reported by a notorious shoplifter named Ada, who has not exactly endeared herself to the Old Bill.Soon, Peter connects all three cases with an unlikely suspect and he races against time to prevent another murder disguised as suicide.

Peter Lovesey is one of the best crime fiction writers today.This is not an English cozy, but an extremely well-written police procedural mystery, well-paced with an intricately woven plot.I would highly recommend both the series and this book.

fantastic Diamond police procedural
Things have been so quiet lately; Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond suffers from hypertension caused by ennui as he has not had a homicide to keep his blood pressure level.Normally Diamond would ignore an apparent suicide by a farmer, but with nothing else to occupy his time, he decides to take a quick look.First thing he realizes that the farmer's arms were too small to pull the trigger of a shotgun placed under his chin

Peter simultaneously investigates what he believes is a homicide while trying to persuade his superior that someone killed the farmer.At about the same time, a girl falls off a rooftop during a party.Initial reaction was it was a tragic accident, but Diamond sees incongruities with that explanation.He investigates both deaths while an amnesiac is found in a hospital parking lot by a shoplifter Ada who reluctantly releases the woman to someone claiming to be a sister.Ada talks with Diamond, who reluctantly follows up her comments and links the two deaths and the abduction with a fourth party as he begins to find the buried connection.

UPON A DARK NIGHT is a fantastic Diamond police procedural as the cop is at his curmudgeon worst due to absolute boredom from no cases; only someone like Diamond could bemoan a major drop in the murder rate.Thus two homicides would have probably remained under the radar screen with the killer free except that Diamond basically had nothing interesting to do.The mystery is brilliantly established so the audience like Diamond's boss sees no foul play until Diamond's inquiries begin to cleverly prove otherwise.Peter Lovesey is at his best with this awesome who-done-it.

Harriet Klausner
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Product Description
One of a series of digitally remastered collections of "Goon Show" episodes, including previously unreleased material. The episodes here are "The White Box of Great Bardfield", "Tales of Montmartre", "The Mystery of the Fake Neddie Seagoons" and "The Great Bank Robbery". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Stirling early days of British 'anarchy' comedy
Influential to British comedy as the Goon Show was (broadcast from 1952 to 1960 with a couple of specials thrown in later) the BBC radion series suffers from not being chronological order and periodically only seeming to have certain titles availabe in cassette form.

No such problem here, volume 10 being available in CD format with two of the comedy troupes 1/2 hour shows per CD.

The White Box of Great Bardfield is the first episode and for the most part is a good enough example of what these guys were on about, a sort of anarchic style of silliness that given the talent of the performers and their inherent understanding of the material usually ends up landing on it's feet.

Tales of Montmartre is a somewhat anonymous episode, but the third episode on this volume really makes up for it by being a good example of how this style of broadcast comedy could work as a show with a plot yet a plot that could sometimes be bent almost out of recognition. Groovy... as they might of said in London several years AFTER this was first broadcast.

The Great Bank Robbery rounds out this collection and ultimately the idea of a botched robbery is fertile ground for the style of stream of consciousness comedy this group excelled at.

There are so many of these things available it's hard to recommend one beyond another but I'd have to say that volumes 8, 9 and 15 are pretty much my faves.

The Goon Show....
Was the brainchild of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Seacombe, and became the forefather of what we've come to know as modern "British Comedy." The ground-breaking antics of the Goons inspired the Monty Python gang, The Goodies, and down the line to Eddie Izzard and the current crowd. The Goon Show itself was sublimely ridiculous, with people dueling with spoons, seaside towns being terrorized by pie throwing maniacs, and ships disguised as trains (to make the train seaworthy it was done up to look like a boat and painted to appear as a tram...all rather confusing, really...) If you've never heard the shows, give them a try! Hear where it all began- in all its anarchic and surreal glory. It's rather unbelievable that this all began in the 50s, isn't it? ... Read more

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From the editors of the acclaimed noir anthology 'Iced' comes a scintillating new post-Valentine's Day gift, a book about the many ways love can go wrong. And don't pretend you've no idea what we're talking about...Consider your own relationship. How much have you revealed to your lover, and how many of these special intimacies have they shared with others? Do you even know the nature of your partner's deepest thoughts? You can't watch over them every moment; in fact you may already have been deceived several times this week! Editors Schooley and Sellers continue their exploration of contemporary noir by gathering a dozen stories from veteran crime writers and emerging, gritty, authors alike. They even throw in a few surprises for good measure. Stories of love misdirected and misplaced. Stories about the passion of obsession and the calculation of deception. Stories of searing jealousy. Stories of grinding indifference. Stories to remind us that in a cold, empty landscape, 'Hard Boiled Love' may be the only warmth there is. ... Read more

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Weekend package trips to hell. A hunter of human heads. A lover's bed wired to execute. Welcome to the offbeat world of Peter Sellers. No, not the actor who stumbled through all those Pink Panther movies as the ineffectual Inspector Clouseau. Not that Peter Sellers. Not the dead one. This Peter Sellers doesn't do pratfalls. This one writes stories. As you are about to find out, he writes sharp, lively stories filled with satiric wit and clever twists. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

wicked
this book is great its got lots of action and suspence. ... Read more

Product Description
Digitally remastered and including new material, this is a revised edition of the double cassette entitled "Goon Show Classics 6". The episodes presented are "Rommel's Treasure", "Ill Met by Goonlight", "I Was Monty's Treble" and "The Seagoon Memoirs". ... Read more

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The third in the Cold Blood series. The best collection of crime/mystery short stories by the finest internationally acclaimed writers in the genre from the United States, Britain and Canada. ... Read more

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Kerry J. Schooley and Peter Sellers continue their critically acclaimed exploration into the humour and terror of noir fiction with this collection of twelve short stories based upon that oldest of human desires: getting even. For their third anthology of crime stories the editors have uncovered tales from a mix of recognised masters and exciting new authors: Hugh Garner ("Hunky"), Jean Rae Baxter ("A Wanton Disregard"), James Powell ("A Murder Coming"), William Bankier ("Dead Like Dogs"), Jas, R. Petrin ("Man on the Roof"), Fab Napoleone ("As The Streetlights Flickered On"), Vern Smith ("The Green Ghetto"), Barbara Fradkin ("Great Minds"), Leslie Watts ("Crocodile Tears"), Nancy Kilpatrick ("Generation Y") and more. These are characters whose time is coming, sure as winter. And like them, readers will savour their cold-blooded Revenge like fine cognac, hand-warmed on a crisp northern night. ... Read more