Classic Mysteries

Five Years!

I'm not trying to dislocate my arm patting myself on the back, but next Monday, June 10, marks the fifth anniversary of the Classic Mysteries blog. The podcast, which began a little more than a year earlier, is now into its seventh year (with roughly 316 weekly reviews published so far).

I want to thank all of you who visit here, especially those of you who join in the conversation by leaving your comments. I hope you all enjoy reading this blog and listening to the podcasts. I plan to keep them going. I may start broadening the author base a bit, to include more recent, even contemporary, authors who are still turning out very good traditional puzzle mysteries. I figure five years is a good solid base, and I promise to keep building on it.

Now back to your regularly scheduled mysteries...

The BEA Report

The annual publishing trade show, Book Expo America, finished its run for 2013 this afternoon, at the gigantic Javits Convention Center in New York City. My tired feet (and aching shoulders; those book bags get VERY heavy) are grateful for the rest.

The conference began, for me, with the Book Bloggers Conference - now retitled as the BEA Bloggers Conference - on Wednesday. There were a couple of interesting keynotes and several panels. I was a bit disappointed, as I was last year, that there was nothing really aimed at those of us who blog about mysteries, given the huge number of mysteries published each year - and what appears to me, at least, to be a significant number of blogs that comment primarily on the mystery/suspense/espionage/thriller genre.

At any rate, the conference was followed by the big show Thursday through Saturday. It's the show where publishers from around the world come to promote their authors and their latest books and to reveal the many titles that will be published in the months ahead. I don't know what the attendance figures are - probably several thousand; I know there were more than a thousand exhibitors and more than 600 authors in attendance.

I attended a couple of very interesting panels on some of the questions facing the industry - and its authors - about digital rights. Who owns them, particularly digital rights for books that were sold to publishers long before there was an internet to make electronic rights an issue? What about so-called "orphaned" works by authors whose works are in a sort of limbo because the authors have died and their estates may or may not have figured out what to do with selling republication rights? It's a complicated and tricky legal tangle.

I did have a chance to talk with some of the people from Open Road Integrated Media, which has been working with publishers such as Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press to republish some classic mystery writers as e-books. Open Road has been very active in seeking solutions to those tricky republication questions, and I wish them well in moving forward.

I also saw several authors whom I know from attendance at Malice Domestic and/or Bouchercon. I made some new friends and contacts as well.  I came home with a lot of new books, some of which I hope will be discussed here in the weeks and months ahead. And right now, I'm going to go soak my feet. And - maybe - read.

Rowrbazzle

As Pogo used to say, when frustrated, ROWRBAZZLE. My blog software (TypePad) apparently has decided to mark a few of my regular commenters' comments as spam and hide them WITHOUT BOTHERING TO TELL ME ABOUT IT. Only found it today when I went through part of my site for routine comments. My profound apologies to those of you who might be wondering what happened - they have now been published (or republished) and I'll try to return some comments. There is such a thing as too much vigilance...sigh...

Unlocking the Locked Room

One of the genres I most enjoy is the locked room mystery and its broader implementation as the "impossible crime" story. All of Clyde B. Clason's works fall into that sphere. So do most of the works of John Dickson Carr, the acknowledged master of the field. Many other mystery authors, from the Golden Age and beyond, have written in the genre, with varying degrees of success.

So it's important, I think, to recognize that there are still authors writing today who specialize in locked room detective stories. Many of them, unfortunately, do not write in English, and translations are not always easy to find.

Enter translator John Pugmire, whom I mentioned earlier on this blog for his terrific work translating the contemporary French locked-room mystery author, Paul Halter. Pugmire now has begun a website devoted to the genre, called Locked Room International. I like the way he defines the genre:

"What is a locked room mystery? It is ideally a mystery which follows Golden Age Rules about providing fair clues to the reader and also poses the question: how was it done? A "locked room" is a special case of the more general "impossible crime," in which one or more victims are discovered dead in what appear to be impossible circumstances (hermetically sealed room, no footprints in the snow, inaccessible site, etc.) It makes no pretense to be probable, no attempt to analyze the human condition, and no effort to probe the detective's foibles. Its purpose is purely and simply to baffle while entertaining. It challenges the mind, not the heart or the spirit."

The site is still pretty basic, and we are promised additions and improvements as it is developed. It's not primarily a blog. Locked Room International is involved in publishing (as print-on-demand and/or e-book editions) good, English-language translations of locked-room masterpieces by Paul Halter and others; there are hints that we may eventually see translated versions from a modern Japanese master of the form.

The site is well worth a visit from anyone interested in the genre. I have more Halter books in my ever-massive "To Be Read" pile, and I'm looking forward to them and other LRI books.

Hat tip to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction mail group on Yahoo, which alerted me to the existence of this new LRI website.

Glad About Gladys Mitchell

More good news this week about still another classic author now showing up in e-book editions. One of my regular readers, Joan Kyler, writes to remind me that Amazon.com has made a dozen mysteries by Gladys Mitchell available as Kindle e-books.

Gladys Mitchell is something of an acquired taste for most American readers. Her primary character, Dame Beatrice Bradley, a criminologist and psychiatrist, appeared in a series of more than sixty books, beginning in 1929 and lasting well into the 1980s. Mrs. Bradley is a marvelously eccentric - but shrewd, intelligent and generally rather sympathetic - character. In the U. K., Mitchell was always considered the equal of the other so-called "Crime Queens" of the Golden Age between the World Wars, but her books never really caught on in the U. S., and only about a third of them were ever published here.

British viewers were treated to some television adaptations of the Mrs. Bradley stories, starring Diana Rigg as Mrs. Bradley. I haven't seen them, and I love Diana Rigg, but I have trouble picturing her as Mrs. Bradley, a woman who is renowned for her reptilian looks and appalling fashion sense. She also has a uniquely personal viewpoint on crime and punishment, even going so far as to commit murder herself. And yet, Mitchell's writing is so filled with quirky (and sometimes VERY dark) humor that Mrs. Bradley comes across as truly likeable. In one novel, for example, speaking to a possible suspect, Mitchell writes: "'I warn you, you’d better stay here,' Mrs. Bradley continued, eyeing him with the maternal anxiety of a boa constrictor which watches its young attempting to devour their first donkey." My own sense of humor is quirky enough to really enjoy that kind of thing. As they say, your mileage may vary, depending on your tolerance for English eccentricity.

The Rue Morgue Press has republished some of Mitchell's better titles in trade paperback editions, giving some their first American publication ever. The addition of a dozen titles for the Kindle at a very affordable price may introduce Mrs. Bradley to a new generation of readers.

Hail the Queen

Yesterday, we had news about a king (Richard III of England). Now, there's news about a Queen: Ellery Queen. The Mysterious Press and Open Road Media have just released a dozen Ellery Queen classics in popular e-book formats, including all of the early "puzzle"-type mysteries for which Queen was famous, with titles including a nationality (American Gun Mystery, Chinese Orange Mystery, Dutch Shoe Mystery, etc.). Also newly re-released: Cat of Many Tails, Ten Days Wonder and And on the Eighth Day, which really are among the best and most powerful of the novels.

If you're not familiar with Ellery Queen - the fictional character and the real-life novelist - "Queen" was really two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee. As a general rule, Dannay came up with the plots in outline form, and Lee turned the outlines into polished novels. Most of the early books included a direct and literal "Challenge to the Reader," just before the final revelations at the end of the book. The reader was informed that she or he had been given all the clues needed to solve the mystery and challenged  to come up with the solution independently before reading the rest of the book. Not too many readers were up to the challenge - I certainly wasn't! And yet the clues are there - if you can find them.

As Ellery Queen, Dannay and Lee were tremendously influential on the traditional branch of the American mystery, and it is just flat-out wrong that their books have slipped into relative obscurity. To celebrate their e-book republication, Open Road Media has provided a link to this video about Ellery Queen, with brief comments from Richard Dannay and Rand Lee, the sons of the authors, and Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Press. Enjoy!

Kindling Books

Did Santa (or anyone else, for any reason or holiday whatsoever) bring you a new Kindle from Amazon this year? Yes, I know there are other models of ebook readers, but I have to stick to what I know, which is the Kindle. And if you have a new one, or even an old one, you may be looking for some ideas about Kindling books - that library of traditional mysteries you've always wanted to carry around with you but never had enough baggage room before.

Well, here are a few suggestions to help you load your Kindle with some fine reading material for a long winter's night or two.

To begin at the beginning, why not "bulk up" and get The Classic Mystery Collection (100+ books and stories) for just $2.99. That includes ALL of the original Sherlock Holmes stories - the four novels and the 56 short stories. It has Hercule Poirot's debut appearance in Agatha Christie's "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" and also her first book about Tommy and Tuppence, "The Secret Adversary." Two of Chesterton's books of Father Brown short stories are here, along with "The Man Who Was Thursday." Ever read E. C. Bentley's "Trent's Last Case"? It's here. And a whole lot more. Sure, there's a lot of "stuff" you may not like - or you may discover some new authors whose works demand exploration. It's worth a shot.

One of my all-time favorite mysteries, still at the top of most lists of "impossible crime" books, is John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man, originally published in the U. S. as "The Three Coffins," now newly re-released as a Kindle book. if you have never read this one, you are in for a treat. What is it about? In the very first paragraph, Carr sets out this challenge to the reader:

“To the murder of Professor Grimaud, and later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street, many fantastic terms could be applied – with reason. Those of Dr. Fell’s friends who like impossible situations will not find in his casebook any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying. Thus: two murders were committed, in such fashion that the murderer must not only have been invisible; but lighter than air. According to the evidence, this person killed his first victim and literally disappeared. Again according to the evidence, he killed his second victim in the middle of an empty street, with watchers at either end; yet not a soul saw him, and no footprint appeared in the snow.”

And that's exactly what you will get.

Another of Carr's impossible crime masterpieces, written as Carter Dickson and featuring Carr's other great creation, Sir Henry Merrivale, is "The Judas Window," with one of the nicest locked room explanations you'll ever encounter. As Sir Henry reminds you throughout, the solution was simply that the murderer used a "Judas Window" to carry out the crime in a locked and bolted room. What's that, you may ask? Why almost every room has one...if you know where to look...

And there's so much more...for example:

• The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L. Sayers, my favorite Lord Peter Wimsey book;
• The House Without a Key, by Earl Derr Biggers, the book that introduced the great Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan;
• The Roman Hat Mystery, starring Ellery Queen, the detective, and written by Ellery Queen, the writer (Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee), featuring a murder in a crowded Broadway theater.

I'm sure you get the idea. There are lots and lots of mysteries eagerly awaiting placement on your Kindle; you can build a TBR pile that is the envy of those of us with teetering hard copy piles. The cold, dark and stormy nights are approaching - be sure your ebooks are ready!

(Disclosure to keep the gummint happy: if you should actually buy something via one of my links to Amazon, I get a few cents - literally - as a commission. Now don't you feel better for knowing that?)

The TBR Pile as Kindling, or Vice Versa

Today is "Cyber-Monday," a major sale day for online merchants. And to mark the day, Amazon has an amazing deal for mystery readers - well, for ALL readers, to be sure, but I'm primarily concerned about my mystery-loving friends. Anyway, if you have a Kindle (if not, they're on sale, too, folks), Amazon has announced literally hundreds of Cyber-Monday-ONLY deals on great mysteries and all kinds of other books at unbelievably low prices, including lots of classics for $2.99 or less each.

It means that my TBR pile continues to grow, thanks to this new stack of Kindling, if you will. Fortunately, the pile is a virtual one, and I am in no danger that it will collapse and bury me under the sheer weight of unread books. But at those prices - which, I believe, are only for today - I'm stocking up. Yes, that includes Golden Age authors, like Dorothy L. Sayers, along with writers such as Donald E. Westlake, Anne Perry, Ruth Rendell, Charlotte MacLeod, Ira Levin, Lawrence Block, Patricia Wentworth, Robert Goldsborough, Ellery Queen, Stuart Kaminsky...you get the idea. And that's just from the first 10 pages of what appears to be a 53 page list, and that's just for mysteries.

Again, today only. Stock up while you can! (Disclosure, I probably get a nickel or two if you buy any of those from Amazon through my link. I assure you I've already spent a lot more than that to get some of these for my Kindle. But caveat lector, I suppose...no, not related to Hannibal...)

If You Please...

With Thanksgiving behind us, we are now in the official holiday shopping season. Whether shopping for Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice - whatever your holiday, I do have a request: IF you are shopping via Amazon.com, I'd really appreciate it if you would please use my link to Amazon (on the right side of this page) to get there.

I am a member of Amazon's affiliate program, which means I get a remarkably small percentage of the total Amazon price for anything sold via my link to Amazon. You can reach anything in Amazon (including their home page) from that link and I will still get credit for your purchases anywhere you go on Amazon within the next half hour or so. It costs you nothing and it helps me pay expenses.

IF YOU ARE BOOK SHOPPING, particularly for mysteries, and you have a local bookstore, or a favorite used bookseller, by all means go to them first. If you are looking for other things besides books, or for books that your bookseller is having trouble finding, then you are invited to use my link.

Thank you, and I wish you and those you care about a very good, happy and healthy holiday season.

New Reviews from ILAM

ILAM - the I Love a Mystery newsletter - has just posted the latest edition of its bimonthly emailing, providing new reviews of dozens of new mysteries in every genre and sub-genre. Editor Sally Powers, who managed to avoid Hurricane Sandy by the simple expedient of living outside the storm's range, has published another issue filled with enticing new books, all trying to add themselves to your own already unmanageable To Be Read piles.

Yes, I have a vested interest - I'm one of the reviewers, with new suggestions in the "Classic Corner." Please check out all the new reviews.