Mystery fans, if you’re interested in learning more about the history of the medium, there’s a super-sized — over 1100 pages! — volume coming out this fall you’ll want to check out. Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s reprints four significant mystery novel launches, plus the inspiration for one of the classic gangster movies. And they’re all annotated by Leslie S. Klinger, who did The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (and is responsible for getting Holmes into the public domain). […]

Dr. Greta Helsing, monster doctor, and her friends are back in Dreadful Company, the followup to Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw, and this book is better than the first. (You can read it without the first, as well, since only the characters continue, and you’re given what you need to know about them.) Greta is in Paris for a medical conference about treating the supernatural. Her vampire friend Ruthven is taking her to the opera, but that’s the last bit […]

Out this week is a Hollywood-set mystery that puts a green spin on the weirdo obsessive detective type. Last Looks by Howard Michael Gould introduces Charlie Waldo. He was an LA police detective before something bad (but predictable) happened, driving him to live in a tiny house in the woods in solitude. He’s decided, in order to minimize his impact on the world, that he can only own 100 things at any time. (Don’t feel too sorry for him. Those […]

It’s a wonderful world we live in, where you never have to accept that you’ve reached the end of a favorite series. If you have enough friends with similar tastes, there’s always more money to be made from a franchise extension. Even if swapping creators or eras means something isn’t as good as it once was. The latest example is the third new mystery starring Agatha Christie‘s Hercule Poirot, as written by Sophie Hannah. The Mystery of Three Quarters, out […]