Classic Mysteries

Closing in on Bouchercon

We're now just over a month away from Bouchercon, the annual gathering of mystery fans, which will be held in St. Louis this year from September 15th to the 18th. It's a fine opportunity for readers to meet many of their favorite authors (and collect some autographed books, while they're at it).

Bouchercon is also a fantastic learning opportunity, as the panels which are featured every day of this event are both entertaining and informative. Bouchercon organizers have now realeased their preliminary list of panels - and, as usual, it looks like attendees, self included, will have some tough choices to make. these panels make it clear that attending Bouchercon remains a great idea, if you can do it.

If you've never been, think about going - if not this year, then next year. Bouchercon 2012 will be in Cleveland October 4-7, 2012 - and it's not too soon to register!

"A Late Phoenix"

I always wind up feeling a bit sorry for C. D. Sloan, the clever Detective Inspector created by British author Catherine Aird. Sloan has a difficult boss, Superintendent Leeyes, who is remarkably little help to him in solving crimes. Sloan is generally saddled with an underling, Detective Constable Crosby, who is even less help (he is known around the station as the "defective constable"). And yet Sloan continues to come up with correct solutions for even the most difficult of cases.

Take his appearance in "A Late Phoenix," which Aird wrote in 1970. It was the fourth novel to feature Sloan and the other members of the Berebury C. I. D. A murder comes to light which evidently took place in a local house when the town was bombed by the Germans during June, 1941. It has taken nearly thirty years for the local government to get its act together and tear down the remains of the houses leveled in the bombing - and, when they do tear it down, they find the skeleton of a woman. There is a bullet lodged in the skeleton, so it quite clearly was a case of murder. But nobody was ever reported missingaround the time of the bombing, and no crime was even suspected until the skeleton was unearthed.

"A Late Phoenix" is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review by clicking here. As always, Sloan is a delight, examining the scanty evidence, looking for a lead, any lead, that can turn this unbelievably cold case into a meaningful investigation. How he does it - and the consequences of the discovery and investigation - make a fascinating novel in the series of Inspector Sloan mysteries. The story is told with the kind of tongue-in-cheek wit that readers have come to expect from Catherine Aird over the years. Fortunately, she is still writing mysteries, and I think she deserves a wider audience in the United States than she has today.

Another Plus for e-Books

While I am certainly a lover of hard-copy, traditional, paper- or hard-back books, I also think the e-book is a great invention. Yes, I know this puts me at odds with a number of my friends who are booksellers, but - as a reader - I think the advantages outweigh the problems.

I've long argued that e-books can be the answer to a publisher's reluctance to keep books more or less in perpetuity on the backlist. If you have an electronic edition, a reader who discovers an author's work 20 or 50 or 100 years down the road can easily import that electronic edition into his or her electronic library. The reader is served. The publisher has an additional sale which might not otherwise have happened. The bookseller who can figure out a way to get a piece of that action will do very well.

But ePublishing has the potential to give today's authors important new possibilities as well. I heard from one such author, Edie Claire, who points out in an email that ePublishing can be of enormous benefit to young authors - even those who have managed to break into print editions:

My cozy mystery series with Penguin/NAL/Signet (The Leigh Koslow Mystery Series, otherwise known as the "Never" books) has been out of print for nearly a decade, but I'm happy to say that the e-book revolution has given it new life. Publishers are indeed digitizing their backlists, but the process is slow and--as you mentioned in one blog--the quality of proofreading associated with the conversion process is generally much below that of printed books. But another part of the story is that many authors, like me, have asked to have their rights reverted on OOP works and are publishing e-versions themselves. I consider this to be a tremendous boon to both authors and readers, since higher royalties on self-published works mean that authors can charge much lower prices and still make a decent profit on their labors. My mass market paperbacks, for example, sold for $5.99 back in the day. Today you can get any of them for Kindle or Nook for only $2.99 (and the first is on sale for just 99 cents.) The response of readers to having these long-OOP books available again has been tremendous--not just for me, but for the many authors I talk to who have followed the same path. In fact, I recently decided, after seeing how many new readers the series had picked up, to write a sixth book in the series, something I never thought would happen. (It really should, though, as I've left my poor heroine pregnant for nine years now.) I belong to several traditionally published authors' loops, and every day, more authors interested in selling their reverted backlists sign on to figure out the system and get the ball rolling again.

You may already know all this, and if so, I apologize! But I hope your readers know that good times are ahead for those who love classic mysteries, because the rise of economically practical independent publishing means more mysteries will soon be available--at least to those with e-readers. These will include new "niche" books whose market isn't broad enough to attract a major print publisher, re-releases of favorites long out of print (both by publishers and authors), and perhaps most exciting of all--new books by authors whose previously OOP series have been reborn. Not to mention the fact that per-book prices, at least those coming directly from authors, will be lower than ever before!

All hail technology!

What do you think? Leave your comments below.

 

Killer Detectives?

I just received an interesting email from one of my Classic Mysteries visitors, Dilys Baker. She observes of Gladys Mitchell's detective, "Mrs. Bradley is one of a rare species, the murderous detective. I know there are quite a few of them but offhand can only think of Valentin in the Father Brown stories. There is Dexter, of course, but I don't really think he counts as a detective."

I think she makes an interesting point. I don't think the murderous detective is all that rare - not if you consider as "murderous" those usually amateur detectives who either manage to kill off the v8illain or who allow the villain to commit suicide rather than face justice.

There are lots of examples. There's Lord Peter Wimsey, in "Murder Must Advertise," for example. Carr's Sir Henry Merrivale and Gideon Fell both allow some of the villains to choose suicide. Bulldog Drummond killed off a reasonable number of his opponents, and so did Reggie Fortune. I just finished reading one of Stuart Palmer's early Hildegarde Withers stories in which Hildy does the same thing.

I'm sure there are many more. Do any of my readers want to contribute other examples by leaving a note here in the comments?

"At the Villa Rose"

Who murdered the wealthy French woman in her own villa - and then proceeded to rob the house? The evidence - almost overwhelming evidence - points to the woman's young companion, Celie, who has disappeared. Could this innocent-looking young woman be involved in a cold-blooded plot, or is she, instead, one of the victims?

These are the questions which face Inspector Hanaud of the Surete in the landmark mystery novel, "At The Villa Rose," first published more than a century ago, in 1910, but still an amazingly well-plotted and enjoyable read today. "At the Villa Rose" is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you may listen to the full review by clicking here.

The author, A. E. W. Mason, was a prolific novelist. If you're a fan of old movies, you may remember a classic film about cowardice and redemption called "The Four Feathers," which was based on perhaps the best-known of Mason's books. He wrote several mysteries featuring Inspector Hanaud. "At the Villa Rose" was the first one; mystery scholar Nick Fuller calls it "the first proper detective novel," as Hanaud sorts through a variety of clues (all carefully misinterpreted for us by the book's narrator, a Hastings type called Mr. Ricardo). Interestingly, the solution of the mystery occurs about halfway through the book, with the rest of the book given over to a re-enactment telling the reader what really DID happen at the Villa Rose on that eventful night.

For the reader of vintage mysteries, Mason's "At the Villa Rose" is worth reading for the influence it would have on later writers, such as Agatha Christie. But the intricate plot and marvelous characters make it a book to be recommended to all lovers of the traditional mystery. If you have an Amazon Kindle, there's an e-book edition available for free.