Comfy, Cozy Cinema: Dial M for Murder

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 15 Comments

Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching Comfy, Cozy movies from September through November.

This week we watched Dial M for Murder (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

This was a great follow up to Rear Window and I’m so glad Erin suggested both of these. I’ve been wanting to watch Dial M for Murder for years but just never got around to it with all the other great movies out there to watch.

Now that I’ve watched it, I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite Hitchcock movie of all time but I really did enjoy it. In some ways I thought things fell together a little too easily at points in this movie but the way they fell into place made me enjoy it – if that makes any sense. It might not make sense if you haven’t watched the movie but if you have then you probably know what I mean.

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Here we have another Hitchcock movie with one of his favorite actresses, Grace Kelly. The movie also stars Ray Milland and Robert Cummings.

Dial M for Murder, based on a very popular play and screenplay by Frederick Knott, was made before Rear Window but both movies released at the same time. It was this movie that made Hitchcock decide he wanted Kelly for Rear Window.

First a little bit about the plot of the film. Tony Wendice is a retired professional British tennis player who is married to his socialite wife, Margot, who has had an affair in the past with American crime-fiction writer Mark Halliday.

Margot doesn’t think Tony knows about the affair. She burned all the letters she received from Mark when she broke it off with him. All the letters except one. She kept that one in her handbag and though we are never definitely sure what was in the letter, we know it was something that meant a lot to her.

Mark has now come to London for a visit and wants to see both Margot and Tony. They are set to go out to a performance together that night but Tony bails at the last minute and tells  them to go on without him and have some fun.

Tony’s eagerness to stay home is what first clued me in that something a bit criminal was about to go down and go down it does.

Tony blackmails a former college classmate to kill Margot. Tony jokes with Mark later when he and Margot come home about how he, Mark, would know more about how to murder a person since he’s a crime writer.

Margo suggests that he and Tony write a book together after Mark is looking through all their clippings of all they did while Tony was a tennis pro and suggests Mark write a book.

“Yes, Mark, will you provide me with the perfect murder?” Tony asks.

Mark quips back, that his books focus less on the detecting and more on the crime itself. “I usually put myself in the criminal’s shoes and then ask what do I do next.”

Mark laughs and says he thinks he can plan a murder on his own but knows that in real life mistakes can be made. It’s not the same as it is in the book, he reminds Tony.

Tony is cocky though. He seems to think he’s a murder-planning master.

Foreshadow much?

My husband says that Hitchcock loved Grace Kelly for his movies and when I looked online that was indeed true. While I thought I had once read that Hitchcock had a strange obsession with Kelly, The Husband says it is more like he felt she was like his muse. That weird obsession thing was with another actress – Tippi Hedren.

To Hitchcock, Kelly was simply extremely beautiful and talented and he felt like there was no actress like her.

According to Offscreen.com, Hitchcock told Donald Spoto, who wrote his biography, that “The subtlety of Grace’s sexuality —her elegant sexiness— appealed to me. That may sound strange, but I think that Grace conveyed so much more sex than the average movie sexpot. With Grace, you had to find out – you had to discover it.”

Before concluding production on Dial M for Murder Hitchcock was already planning his next film – with Kelly in the lead. That next film was Rear Window.

Like Rear Window, Kelly wears some amazing outfits in this movie, by the way. The one that stands out for me is the red dress in the beginning. What a stunner.

I like what the writer on Offscreen said about the dress and the relationship of her outfits to scenes in the movie:

“Hitchcock starts the opening sequence at a breakfast table where Kelly is dressed demurely in a beige dressing gown; she reads a notice about the arrival of her lover on the Queen Mary; the ship arrives in dock; in seconds she is costumed in a red dress, embracing him in the flat where hours earlier she breakfasted with her supposedly unsuspecting husband. They are in the classic London flat but the picture presented is quite different as a result of clever writing, editing and colour coding. It also played on Hitchcock’s private perception of Kelly: he nicknamed her “the snow princess.”

I thought it was interesting that it was Cary Grant who told Hitchcock about the play version of Dial M for Murder, which debuted in 1952. Grant saw himself as the potential wife-killer, something Offscreen.com says Hitchcock always wanted Grant to play. Unfortunately Grant’s agents asked for way too much money so Hitchcock turned to Milland.

As a huge fan of Cary Grant I can honestly say I could see him playing the part Milland played, but Milland pulled it off in more dramatic fashion than I think Cary might have. Sometimes I have trouble seeing Cary in a dramatic role because even when I know he’s trying to be serious I think of his more playful movies and struggle to focus on him being the “bad guy.”

Milland, by the way, had won an Academy Award in 1945 for The Lost Weekend, so Hitchcock felt he was a good second pick.

Hitchcock chose not to change the play when he made the film and was quoted as saying this: “You buy a play for its construction. It’s the construction that makes it a hit. If you change that you’re ruining the very thing you bought. Just shoot the play.”

I thought this was ironic since he did change the endings of films that were based on novels he bought the rights to.

Have you ever seen this one? What did you think of it? Is it among your favorite Alfred Hitchcock films?

I was looking through a list of Alfred Hitchcock films the other day and I realized there are a ton I have never seen. I hope to make a marathon of his movies sometime soon.

I found Dial M For Murder on Tubi, by the way.

You can read Erin’s impression of the movie here:https://crackercrumblife.com/2024/10/24/comfy-cozy-cinema-dial-m-for-murder/

Up next in our Comfy, Cozy Cinema is a Halloween wildcard but Erin and I are both watching Practical Magic if you want to join us.

Here is our complete list of movies that we’ve watched and will be watching.

You can find links to my impressions of the ones we’ve watched so far here.

If you want to link up your own post about this movie, or even other ones, you can do so at this link:

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Top Ten Tuesday: How My Reading Habits Have Changed Over Time

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 18 Comments

|| Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. ||

Today’s topic is: How My Reading Habits Have Changed Over Time (submitted by Lydia @ https://lydiaschoch.com)

I don’t really know how to do this as a top ten list so I thought I’d just chat about it.

I started reading fiction fairly consistently when I was a kid and then even more when I was a teenager. When I was a “kid” – like under the age of 13 – I read books like the Little House series and the Chronicles of Narnia and sometimes I used a flashlight to finish a chapter because Mom had said I needed to go to bed and shut my light off but I didn’t want to go to bed yet.

I never read books quickly but I consistently had a book with me when I was a teenager. Back then I read mainly historical fiction and some clean/Christian romance. Now I read mainly mysteries – clean and cozy mainly.

In high school I got in trouble at least twice for reading in class. It’s not my fault my Roman-based epic was way more interesting than the football coach rambling about driver safety. Or a book from that same series (The Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers) was way more interesting than my history teacher who never really taught but mostly talked about football because he was the other football coach. Huh. Coincidence there? I think not.

I remember my mom came to a parent teacher conference, holding one of those books because we had picked it up at the local Christian bookstore (which only lasted about two years in our tiny community) and the teacher said, “Oh. Is that one of those books you got caught reading in class the other day?”

My mom, with her quick wit, said, “Yes, it probably is but it is based in history at least.”

I don’t think she meant that as a slam against that teacher but he was the one who used to start classes each year by holding up the text book and saying, “You can take this an use it to prop up a window.” Then he’d spend the rest of the year talking about who knows what from the front of the classroom with very little of it being actual history.

The only thing I remember from his class is how he told us all not to mess around with pimples and other spots on our skin because his mom had one she didn’t get checked and it was cancer. I don’t know if she died from it or not but that unlocked a new fear for me.

In college I mainly read textbooks. I didn’t seem to have time for reading fiction. I started working full time my senior year of college and there was no time for reading. I was taking classes twice a week and working like 60 hours a week, sometimes seven days. That’s about the time I killed my thyroid and my mental health but I was young and stupid.

I don’t really remember picking many fiction books back up again until a few years ago when I really got back into reading again. When I had my kids I was working full time at newspapers or writing blog posts or completely immersed in photography and homeschooling while taking care of kids. I didn’t take a lot of time for myself or to escape the stress of life by reading fiction. I wish I had because it would  have helped all the stress back then.

Now I always have a hard copy of a book and my Kindle in my purse or with me wherever I go. I may not always read the book but I have it with me “just in case.” Instead of watching TV or surfing online all the time, I now carve out time for reading, even on the days I think I don’t feel like reading. I’ll find that once I start reading, I get caught up in the story and I start to relax and forget about all the things I was stressed about. I think I recently heard that reading even 15 minutes a day can help a person relax and reset their emotional state. Something like that anyhow. I don’t know – just go with it and pretend I’m smart. *wink*

Now that I am reading more, I have gotten caught up more than once with feeling like I have to read what other people are reading instead of what I want to read. It’s crazy that even at my age I can be influenced by what is popular or talked about a lot or what others say I should or shouldn’t read. Luckily, I have pushed aside a lot of that in the last year and now I really am reading what I want to read.

Sure, I see recommendations and sometimes I take them but I don’t just read a book because a lot of people claim it is good. Yes, I have read books that I’ve seen recommended a few times, but I don’t feel like I have to anymore. I do it because the book actually interests me.

Honestly, I find myself leaning away from books that are heavily recommended more than I lean toward them. I’ve been burned more than once by books that were supposed to be so amazing and then turned out to be complete duds or pushed agendas or morals that didn’t fit with mine.

Becoming an independent author opened my eyes to the publishing world and how reviews can be bought, essentially, or reviewers can be swayed to give a book a good review because they either don’t want to be excluded from other advanced reader groups or because they don’t be the one to step out of line and say, “I didn’t like this book everyone else liked.”

Before this year I was susceptible to getting wrapped up in all those “BookTok” (not on TikTok though. What a nightmare that app is!) “Bookstagram” drama sessions about – well, everything about reading. This year, though, I couldn’t care less what some Bookstagrammer says I should or shouldn’t read or what I shouldn’t or shouldn’t say on social media.

I read books, I share about the ones I like, I move on. Life is way too short to be so dramatic about reading. Good grief. Reading is for leisure and enjoyment. There was a time when only the rich could read books and then it became so everyone could read books as long as they had a good education and were taught to read.

Now we teach children to read at a young age so the world is opened wide to them. They can learn so much from books – fiction and non-fiction. This can be a bad thing, of course, if the subject matter is not age appropriate but in the vast majority of cases being able to read is a wonderful thing.

Because reading is a gift, I don’t believe we should try to finish books that don’t bring us joy. I do not continue reading a book I am not connecting with. A couple of years ago I made way too many commitments to read books and review them without knowing what I was really getting into. This year I have been reading books because I want to.

 I read a couple of books for author friends and ran into trouble because the books were okay but they simply weren’t for me. Then what do I do? I don’t want to keep reading the book simply because the person is a friend if it is taking the joy out of reading for me. That’s why I’m now deciding that if I do read a book by an author friend, I’m not going to tell them I am reading it in case I don’t enjoy it.

Life is too short to read books qw aren’t enjoying. This is something I’ve heard said in reading circles again and again and it is something that we readers need to heed more.

Sometimes I do break my own “rules”, though. I’m reading one right now that isn’t one I’d probably finish if it was just me reading for fun, but I’m reading it to review for a magazine. Just because the book isn’t really for me, doesn’t mean it won’t be for someone else. The fact I am pushing myself through this book, though, has made me decide I probably won’t be doing reviews for magazines anymore unless I have already read the book first and enjoyed it.

My motto the rest of this year and next, therefore, is to read what I want and review it only if I want to.

I hope I can keep up with that because taking the pressure off something that should be done for enjoyment and relaxation is what I really need in my life right now.

How has what and how you read changed over the years?

Sunday Bookends: Changing leaves, more mysteries (yes again), and my parents’ cats

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 8 Comments

It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what the rest of the family and I have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.

This week I’m joining up with Kimba at Caffeinated Reviewer, Deb at Readerbuzz, and Kathyrn at The Book Date.



What’s Been Occurring

The leaves have almost all fallen off here in Pennsylvania which means it is time for leaf jumping for our youngest and maybe for our oldest too if the youngest can convince him to jump with her.

I don’t remember jumping in piles of leaves very often when I was younger but my kids have always loved it. Little Miss raked some leaves yesterday to get ready for more jumping today and as she raked, my parents’ cat, Molly, watched quietly from the porch. Looking at Molly I thought about how little I know about my parents’ current cats. My parents don’t seek out pets. Any cats my parents end up with were dropped off at the non-working barn on the property or wandered up from the neighbors who seem to refuse to spay or neuter.

Two cats, both now passed away, were mine/ours. When my parents first moved to my grandmother’s house when I was in college, our all-black at Zorro came with us. We had moved from my great-grandparent’s house across a little creek (over the creek and through the woods was how we got to grandma’s house) so I was worried Zorro would try to walk through the woods back to our old house, but, as far as I remember, he never did.

Between college and when I got married, I lived at that old house (built in the mid-1800s) and had a cat named Four that I rescued from my pet-hoarding mother-in-law’s house. The cat once belonged to my sister-in-law who adopted pets and got rid of them like she did old shoes. The cat was mostly gray but had a number 4 in orange in the gray for on the top of her head. When my sister-in-law had her, she peed on my ex-brother-in-law’s side of the bed because she hated him. I wish my sister-in-law had seen that as an omen since she didn’t see his drug use and abuse as one and remained with him for years until he cheated on her after baby number five.

My parents took Four in and when my aunt moved in she fell in love with Four.

Both Four and Zorro are gone now and I miss them terribly.

When I was in college someone dropped a cat off at my parents/grandmother’s house and I named the him before my parents and grandmother could even consider sending him to the shelter. I knew if I named him, it would be harder for them to get rid of him. I named him Leonardo after Leonardo DiCaprio because he was very popular at the time – Romeo and Juliet and Titanic had both come out that year.

Mom said there was no way she was going to go out on the back porch and yell “Leonardo!” but she did for the next several years, including one week when he went missing and we all thought he died somewhere. Instead, my dad went to the small granary where he stores lawn equipment and various other items and a skinny cat darted out and ran to the patio. Mom said, “Well, what cat is that? It’s not Leonardo. He’s too skinny.”

Poor fat Leonardo had been locked in the granary for almost a week and had lost a ton of weight.

I always wanted to pet Leonardo but he had no interest in letting me. In fact, the only one he would let pet him was my 88 year old grandmother who sat calmly in her chair on the deck to enjoy the sun. He would curl up next to her and she’d rub his head. She was not a animal person either. I never remember her ever having a pet when I grew up. Leonardo loved her though.

Anyhow, back to my parents’ current cats. They are Buzz, a gigantic, fluffy, orange beast who looks like a Main Coon, and Molly, a black and white polydactyl. I visit them once or twice a week but don’t know the cats well because they are usually hiding from Zooma The Wonder Dog when we visit which means I can’t sit and really learn about them. I’ve only managed to pet Molly once.

Buzz is almost feral, though, so I wouldn’t get to know him anyhow. My dad is the only one who can pet Buzz and the one Molly will come right up to. I think her tendency to run when we are there and her usual fear of us is why I was surprised she watched us in the yard yesterday. Zooma was even with us, which made it even more surprising. I think both Zooma’s smell and eyesight were broken because she never saw Molly or chased after her like she usually does.

By the way, none of the cats we’ve ever had have been able to be inside cats since my mom is actually very allergic to cats. They make her itch all over.

What I/we’ve been Reading

I am still reading The Case of the Innocent Husband by Deborah Sprinkle and Handcrafted Murder by Isabella Alan. I will finish The Case of the Innocent Husband this week.


I have put the Lilian Jackson Braun book on the backburner because I would really like to read The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood to see what it is like.

After that I would like to finish The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, which I recently started.

Little Miss is reading Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone at night (I’m trying to convince her to also read it during the day. Not going so well.). Some nights she and I are reading The Four Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright and during the school day we are reading Johnny Tremain which we are both enjoying. Last week we painted pumpkins while listening to it on Audible, but normally I read the book to her as part of our school day.

The Husband is reading Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.

The Boy and I will be starting The Hound of the Baskerville by Arthur Conan Doyle this week after suffering through Beowulf, which I actually just read the summary of. I’m not going to lie about that.

What We watched/are Watching

This past week I rewatched parts of Rear Window so I could write about it for my blog post and then I watched a lot of Murder She Wrote.

The Husband and I watched an episode of the new Frasier show as well. I started watching Only Murders in the Building now that we have a Hulu subscription and then made The Husband watch the first episode with me. We are hooked and I can’t promise I won’t watch more of the show without him since he often has night meetings and I am impatient to find out what happens.

I  hope to watch some more old movies this week in addition to Dial M for Murder that I am watching for the Comfy, Cozy Cinema.


What I’m Writing

Still working on Gladwynn Grant Shakes the Family Tree and having fun.

On the blog I shared:

Photos from Last Week

Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.

Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot! Come Link Up With Us

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 11 Comments

Welcome to another Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot hosted by Marsha in the Middle, Melynda from Scratch Made Food & DYI Homemade Household, Sue from Women Living Well After 50, and me.  Look for the link party to go live on Thursdays at 9:30pm EDT. 

This is a blog link-up where we not only allow you to share your past posts but we encourage it. So share away!

This week’s most clicked were:

|| A New Look and Jellicle Cats Tablescape by Thrifting Wonderland ||

My highlights for the week are:

|| The Hen and The Egg by Cat’s Wire ||

|| Hocus Pocus Pea Soup by Serenity You ||

|| Afternoon Tea At The Globe Theatre by Southwest Rambler ||

I’m so glad you are here and participating in our weekly link-up of family-friendly, fun, educational, interesting, crafty, fashionable, and whatever else posts. I hope you’ll tell your followers about our post (feel free to copy and paste the graphic) and visit the blogs in the link-up. 

Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago. You can share up to three links each week.

We are always looking for additional hosts so let us know if you want to help out and we are also looking for more links from fashion bloggers so let your fashion bloggers know!

Also, please take the time to visit the other blogs on the link-up and meet some new bloggers!

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Comfy, Cozy Cinema: Rear Window

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 11 Comments

“Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence .” – Stella from Rear Window

Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching Comfy, Cozy movies this September and October and this week we watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window – or rewatched for me.

Rear Window is one of Hitchcock’s more well-known and praised movies because of the intricacy of the story, the attention to detail, and the masterful storytelling that makes the viewer as desperate as the main character to find out what happens.

Laid up with a broken leg, our main character, photojournalist Jeff Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart) is stuck in a two-room apartment looking out on all his neighbors on the other side of his apartment complex.

It’s like he has a bunch of TV channels in each window to watch. There’s always something on. He uses a pair of binoculars to watch what they’re doing part of the time and part of the time he can see them with the naked eye.

There is a newlywed couple who are – ahem – getting to know each other; a couple who appear to be arguing; a woman who lowers her dog down to do his business in the little yard below each day; an athletic dancer who likes to stretch in front of her window; a lonely woman who eats her dinners alone; and many other characters for Jeff to watch.

One night he wakes up in his wheelchair, where he has been sitting for the whole movie, because he hears a scream and breaking class. He can’t figure out where the sounds came from and drifts back to sleep but later, when he wakes up again, he notices the one neighbor – the jewelry salesman who argued with his wife — acting very mysterious.

The neighbor in question, Lars Thorwald, (Raymond Burr) starts going in and out of his apartment with a suitcase. It’s around 2 a.m. when this starts at it’s pouring out. Jeff can’t figure out what that’s all about and struggles to stay awake to watch the man but finally succumbs to exhaustion.

I should mention that Jeff has a girlfriend, Lisa, (Grace Kelly) who is absolutely perfect, but he is making all kinds of excuses not to marry her and one of those excuses is that she won’t enjoy traveling with a journalist.

He tells his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and Lisa about it on their separate visits, but both seem to think he just has a bad case of cabin fever.

As he continues to ponder it all and notices that the man’s wife is no longer in the apartment, Jeff pulls out the zoom lens of his camera and watches the man cutting something up, putting it in bags, and carrying it out. Now he’s starting to really get antsy about what he’s witnessed.  It isn’t until Lisa is over one night and he’s telling her what he thinks that she begins to get a little interest as well. What piques both their interest is how the man is tying up a trunk and removing the mattress from the room.

Soon the nurse, Stella, is also pulled in, and all three of them begin to speculate what really happened.

Before long Jeff has Stella and Lisa acting as willing spies for him to find out what really happened.

If you want suspense then this the right movie for you. It is one of Hitchcock’s most suspenseful and nail biting movies.

The movie is based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich. I read an essay online (the author of which I couldn’t find, but it did say it wasn’t AI) that said this movie didn’t attempt to copy the story but instead recreated the plot based on the idea of it.

I did find a summary of the story and the ending is different in some ways to the movie, but with the final outcome being the same.

This writer, as other critics, point out that one aspect of this film that makes it so brilliant is that the viewer knows as much as Jeff does during the movie. We, the viewer, are watching it all unfold as he is and are seeing it from his same vantage point. We aren’t taken into apartments where he isn’t or into scenes that he isn’t looking at from his window. We are a participant in the film, so to speak.

Rear Window was filmed on a budget of $1 million but pulled in $36 million and became the top grossing film of 1954.

According to the site, All The Right Movies, the original story was based on a high-profile murder case in 1924 in Sussex England where a man named Patrick Mahon — committed a crime – well, I won’t tell you what happened in case you haven’t seen Rear Window.

Stewart had already been in one Hitchcock movie before this one (Rope) and would film two others afterward – Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much.

For this film he was anxious to work with Hitchcock and said he wouldn’t take a salary but would take part of the film’s profits, which I think worked out very well for him. While the two got along, there were also times they spoke very little to each other, according to other actors who worked with them.

Wendell Corey, who played Detective Doyle in the movie, said, “Jimmy and Hitch would communicate in unspoken glances, and Jimmy would give him a steely look if Hitch said something he didn’t like. The only direction I ever saw Jimmy take was ‘the scene feels tired’ – there was steel under all that mushiness.”

Corey wasn’t a fan of Stewart in some ways. He was a nice guy, he said, but claimed he was also very arrogant on the set of Rear Window.

Others didn’t apparently didn’t hold this assessment and to me I think it was Corey who had the arrogance issue.

I thought it was interesting that Stewart’s wife asked to be on set during the filming of this movie because of Grace Kelly. According to trivia on All The Right Movies, “Grace Kelly may have been a little too friendly for some people, though – especially James Stewart’s wife. In 1954, Kelly had a reputation for having affairs with her leading men and, after she told a magazine she thought Stewart was one of the most attractive men she’d ever met, Stewart’s wife, Gloria, insisted on being on the set every day to keep an eye on things.”

Rear Window was Stewart’s favorite film of those he worked on Hitchcock with.

“The wonderful thing about Rear Window is that so much of it is visual,” he said in an interview. “You really have to keep your eyes open in the film, because it’s a complicated thing. This was my favorite film to make with Hitch.”

One more piece of trivia that had me snickering was that Hitchcock made the bad guy in this film (Again, I’ll keep it quiet on who the real bad guy is) look and act like David Selznick who produced Rebecca with Hitchcock. Hitchcock said Selznick interfered so much on that film he disowned it. In Rear Window he got his revenge by making the guilty party look like the producer he couldn’t stand.

I love the trivia behind the making of movies, as you know if you’ve read any of my previous posts, so I could go on and on about it. I won’t though. Instead, I’ll point you over to Erin’s blog for her views on it:

Keeping with the Hitchcock and Grace Kelly movies, we will be switching up our movie lineup next week and watching Dial M For Murder. To explain why we are choosing to watch this instead of Murder by Death, I’ll refer to Erin’s well-written explanation, which she also shares on her blog today: https://crackercrumblife.com/2024/10/17/comfy-cozy-cinema-rear-window/

“We were originally going to watch a movie I chose, Murder by Death. I chose it because I read that it was funny and because it has Maggie Smith in it but I didn’t do much research on it other than that.

 However, after doing some reading it looks like it could be considered problematic so we are going to scrap that one and trade it for Dial M for Murder instead. It is probably not a bad movie, but a movie that didn’t meet the goal of what was trying to be achieved – it was actually trying to shine a light on racism and homophobia, and no one mentions the ableism but I think I read that is in there too, that was prevalent in Hollywood and the world, but instead just looks like it is in fact all of those things itself.

Anyway, we decided to watch Dial M for Murder for Comfy Cozy Cinema, since we are trying to be cozy and snug with this fun movie watching challenge.  I think both of us plan on watching Murder by Death at some point though, whether it is together or just on our own.”

Here is the rest of the full list of movies we are watching or have watched.

I’m also including a link to my blog posts up from this year’s Comfy, Cozy Cinema, at the top of the page under the heading Movie Impressions.

Before I close out for today, I wanted to mention that we did pick a winner for our Comfy, Cozy Giveaway – Yvonne – and she has been notified! Thank you to all of you who entered the giveaway, followed our blogs, Etsy and Substack and I hope you will stick around and have some fun with us as we write about books, movies, and our lives.

If you end up writing about Rear Window or any of the other movies we are watching, please feel free to link up with our linky. You can add a link to the link if it is open, even if it is for a different movie.

Lisa H. 7:59 PM (1 hour ago) to me

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Book review/recommendation: Move Your Blooming Corpse by D.E. Ireland

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 11 Comments

My 10-year-old daughter picked out a hardcover copy of Move Your Blooming Corpse by D.E. Ireland for me at a used bookstore about a month ago.

As soon as I saw that cover, I had a gut feeling I was going to like it. Luckily my gut was not wrong. As soon as I saw that cover and title I wanted to know if it would feature the characters from My Fair Lady since I knew the title was alluding to the famous line Eliza Doolittle yells out in the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, you’ll have to look it up.

When I read the title of the series on the front (An Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins Mystery), I was giddy with delight to know that it was based on the same characters.

This was a delightful, fun, and engaging mystery that takes place – as the inside cover says – in the Edwardian racing world. It is a very fast-paced story with very few slow scenes.

The book starts with Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins at a horse race to cheer on Eliza’s father’s horse, which he co-owns with a group of about 10 other people.

When a murder occurs after the race it seems to be an isolated incident but future developments show that someone is after the members of the horse-owning syndicate. The question is – why?

Woven into the murder mystery is an underlying story of women’s suffrage as women fight for their right to vote in England.

The main characters – Eliza, Henry, Arthur (Eliza’s father), and Freddy (Eliza’s “boyfriend”) are very likable and fun, much like the characters in My Fair Lady. I will say that Henry Higgins was much more likable in this book than the film since I only wanted to throttle him a few times in the book instead of almost the entire time in the movie.

I loved the quick wit of the characters and how closely they mirrored the wit and charm of the characters in the movie. The movie is based on the 1957 Broadway Musical, which was based on the 1914 play, Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.

The back-and-forth, quick-paced conversations between the characters, the complex mystery, and the well-developed side characters made this one a very fun read for me.

I was very excited to see there are four other books in the series. This was the second book in the series but I didn’t feel like I’d missed something by not reading the first. I also liked how the plot and outcome of the first book weren’t given away in this book, which means you don’t have to read the series in order to understand what is going on in each book.

For those who are not fans of romance in books, there is very little in this one, and the romance that is there is so minor and secondary that it’s barely a blip on the romance meter. For those who are not fans of swearing, there is, I think, only one or two minor swear words. For those who are not a fan of graphic descriptions, this book will also work for you because there are no graphic descriptions of any of the crimes.

As a side note – the cover art for the Kindle version of this book is hideous and amateur-looking to me. The cover on the hardcover/library version that I bought is – dare I say it? Delightful. So if you go to look for the Kindle edition, please don’t run away. I promise the book is much better than the cover that is shown.

Have you read this book or any of the others in the series?


Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Was Assigned To Read In School

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 27 Comments

|| Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. ||

This week’s theme is: Books I Was Assigned to Read in School (These can be books you loved or hated. Or just tolerated. Bonus points if you give us a tiny review of your thoughts!)

While I was looking up books to jog my memory on some of the books I read (I remembered many of them but was trying to get the list to ten), I found a post by a teacher on a forum lamenting the fact that students no longer want to read novels and are pretty much only interested in getting the grade, not learning. They don’t want to take the time to read the novels and learn from them and that is heartbreaking to me. Sure, some of these books were torture for me to push through, but the lessons in them were important and if a teacher hadn’t said to me, “You’re reading this or you won’t pass this class,” then I might have avoided them. That would have been a shame.

I’m glad I’ve exposed my kids to some classic books, even if they’ve whined quite a bit about it. Anyhow, I’ll step off my soapbox now and just list those books I was assigned in school.

  • Hiroshima by John Hersey – about the atom bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, Japan to end World War II. For a AP English course. Horrific, nauseating, and horrifyingly eye-opening for me.
  • The Awakening by Kate Chopin for AP English. Hated it but may suffer through it one day again to see if I hated it as much as I think I did. I probably will.
  • 1984  by George Orwell  – for AP English. Scared the living daylights out of me. Scares me more even now as I watch it unfold around me.
  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding. For 9th or 10th grade English. Disturbed me. Disturbed me worse when I read it two years ago with my son for his high school English.
  • To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I read this in sixth or seventh grade and then was assigned it in eighth grade and when the teacher found out I’d already read it she was surprised. I couldn’t get into it until my mom started to read it to me in her Southern accent. It became my favorite book. Read it again with my son two years ago for English. It impacted me even more the second time. So much so that I sobbed through half of it. It’s still my favorite book.
  • Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck – I don’t remember a ton about this book except it was sad and I didn’t like it.
  • A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickins. I don’t think we actually read this entire book. What we did read was okay for me but when I tried it again for eleventh grade English with my son we both ended up avoiding it and switched gears.
  • Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. I’m not sure this counts as a book because it is a play but I had to read it and with the help of translation by my teacher, I ended up liking it quite a bit. I also liked Taming of the Shrew.
  • Silas Marner by George Elliot. My son and I read this for his English class so I am going to count it for school, even though it wasn’t my school. I ended up like it much more than I thought I would.
  • The Year of Miss Agnes by Kirkpatrick Hill. This is another one I didn’t have to read but was assigned reading for my daughter for her history curriculum last year. We both really enjoyed and – yet again – I cried through part of it.

Have you ever read any of these?

Sunday Bookends: Adventures with the parents, fall foliage, and reading more mysteries

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 35 Comments

It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what the rest of the family and I have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.

This week I’m joining up with Kimba at Caffeinated Reviewer, Deb at Readerbuzz, and Kathyrn at The Book Date.


What’s Been Occurring

Yesterday Dad, Little Miss, and I took my mom leaf peeping before all our leaves are gone. We didn’t have a very pretty year because of the warmer, dry temps we had in August and part of September but we did see some pretty trees on our drive.

We drove on some back roads (a.k.a. dirt roads) near my parents and eventually ended up at a house and former farm where some of my dad’s distant family used to live.

Throughout my whole life anytime we decided to go for a drive around the area or anywhere else, what normally would have been a routine or sightseeing trip became a weird adventure. My parents are 80 now so I thought our days of adventure were over but once again a simple leaf peeping trip became a little weird. First we passed a field of modern art sculptures all lined up in a field – sort of weird.

And when we stopped at the distant relative’s house things also got very weird.

We didn’t know who still lived at the house Dad used to visit as a kid, so Dad climbed out of the car and disappeared over a hill between the house and garage for a bit while he looked for the homeowner. While waiting for him, Little Miss, Mom and I watched another car rip into the long driveway, continue between two trees and stopped near our car. I rolled my window down and apologized for being in the way but the woman frowned and just said, “That’s fine.”

She went into the house without even asking why we were in her drive. I decided it was time to look for Dad in case she was really ticked off at us for being there, so I climbed out after telling my mom that the woman looked very familiar. I thought she looked like the manager of our local Dollar General.

A few minutes later, my dad and another man were walking from the back of the house, up the hill, and the woman, who had left the house to put the dog on a lead, marched toward my dad with her finger pointing at him and said, “You get your car out of my driveway!”

I panicked. Our trip was taking a very dark turn and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get my dad away from the crazy woman. But Dad was smiling and so was the man. I couldn’t see the woman but then she was patting my dad on the shoulder and I realized she was messing with my dad – probably how he picks on her when he stops in at the Dollar General.

In the end, we all had a good conversation and Dad shared some memories of visiting the former farm years before – like when he was 12 or 13.

After that, we took the long way home, and Little Miss and I spent the afternoon having dinner with my parents before heading home.

Today I have to pick up The Boy from a friend’s house and we will stop for lunch at my parents on the way back. Hopefully, we don’t have another weird adventure.  

What I/we’ve been Reading

The Case of the Innocent Husband (A Mac and Sam Mystery Book 1), Murder Handcrafted by Isabella Alan, and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler.

The Secret of Red Gate Farm by Carolyn Keene (A Nancy Drew Mystery)

The Cat Who Brought Down the House by Lilian Jackson Braun

The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood

Little Miss is reading the first Harry Potter book at night. I love that she’s reading but she starts too late at night and then I have to tell her that it’s time for bed and she tries to make me feel guilty by saying things like, “But I only have 15 minutes of the chapter left to go!”

Stupid Kindles and their ability to tell you how many minutes of a chapter you have to go.

We are also reading The Four-Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright on some nights. For school/during the day we are reading Johnny Tremain.

The Husband just finished The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christies and is getting ready to read book 99. He is going to read The Satanic Verses by Salaman Rushdie for book 100.

What We watched/are Watching


Last week I watched a lot of Lovejoy and Murder She Wrote, Blithe Spirit with Erin for our Comfy, Cozy Cinema, and Reading Rainbow for old time’s sake.

What I’m Writing

I am still writing Gladwynn Grant Shakes The Family Tree and announced on Instagram that I will be pushing off the release date to 2025 so I can take some more time on it. I was pushing myself too hard to get it done before the end of October and now I realize that I am stressing myself out about a book that I am not under a publishing contract for and that I am writing more for fun than anything else.

If anyone would like to read books one or two, though, you can find them here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1KSQJXP

On the blog last week I didn’t share a ton since I was working on the book, but here is what I did share:

What I’m Listening To

I was listening to Ever After by Karen Barnett but I am not a big fan of the narrator so not sure I’ll finish it.

Photos From Last Week

Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.

Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot: Come Link Up With Us!

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 8 Comments

Welcome to another Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot hosted by Marsha in the Middle, Melynda from Scratch Made Food & DYI Homemade Household, Sue from Women Living Well After 50, and me.  Look for the link party to go live on Thursdays at 9:30pm EDT. 

This is a blog link-up where we not only allow you to share your past posts but we encourage it. So share away!

Remember when I was all like, “I can’t wait for fall weather! I want to cozy under my blankets and read a book!”

Yeah, well, fall weather is one thing. Winter-like weather in October is another. This past week our temps dropped close to the 30s and I was a bit shellshocked by it. Luckily I did have a warm blanket and a book to survive it and didn’t have to leave the house too much for any appointments or other events.

How is the weather where you are?

We had some great links this week for our link up. Did you get to check some of them out?

Here is our most clicked for the week:

|| Let’s Think Fall Table and Nosegay In the Den by Thrifting Wonderland ||

And here are my highlights for the week:

|| Bushels of Fun with Apple Volcanoes, Poison Apples and More by Our Grand Lives ||

|| Autumn Adventures in Somerset: Our Weekly Postcard by Deb’s World ||

|| September: A Month of Weddings by Fine Whatever Blog ||

I’m so glad you are here and participating in our weekly link-up of family-friendly, fun, educational, interesting, crafty, fashionable, and whatever else posts. I hope you’ll tell your followers about our post (feel free to copy and paste the graphic) and visit the blogs in the link-up. 

Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago. You can share up to three links each week.

We are always looking for additional hosts so let us know if you want to help out and we are also looking for more links from fashion bloggers so let your fashion bloggers know!

Also, please take the time to visit the other blogs on the link-up and meet some new bloggers!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter
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