Davies on A Stout Stanza of Many Meanings, Maybe: The Romantic Roots of Some Buried Caesar @GB2d @horacefuller @georgemasonlaw

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, has published A Stout Stanza of Many Meanings, Maybe: The Romantic Roots of Some Buried Caesar at 25 The Gazette, a Journal of Detective Fiction 4 (Autumn 2023).

This paper presents a bit of speculation — actually, two speculations — about Rex Stout’s sixth Nero Wolfe / Archie Goodwin novel, Some Buried Caesar. I hope those speculations will inspire — or perhaps it would be better to say incite — discussion about Stout’s choice of title for the tale. First, the question: Where did the title for this story come from? Second, the answers: (a) Stout’s familiarity (during an early romance) with the bloody yet bucolic lines from a famous poem — Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát — made the titling of a bloody murder mystery with a romantic plot thread in a bucolic setting easy, and (b) the Rubáiyát was connected in Stout’s mind not only with fine poetic lines about bloodshed and bucolics, but also with fraud, which was also a plot thread in Some Buried Caesar.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Davies on A Great Borrower and a Great Originator, and Also, Perhaps, a Great Lender @horacefuller @NeroWolfePack

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, has published A Great Borrower and a Great Originator, and  Also, Perhaps, a Great Lender, at The Gazette–The Journal of the Wolfe Pack, Fall 2021, at 3. Here is the abstract.

This is the full, annotated, original version of a paper that was delivered as a toast to Rex Stout at the The Wolfe Pack's Black Orchid Dinner (on Zoom) on December 5, 2020. The abbreviated toasty version was published (without footnotes), on pages 3 to 5 of the Fall 2021 issue of The Gazette — The Journal of the Wolfe Pack. The paper argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Rex Stout did NOT borrow from Agatha Christie when he wrote his first Nero Wolfe detective story; rather, it was more likely Christie who borrowed from Stout.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Repost: Through a Glass Darkly: European History and Politics in Contemporary Crime Narratives: Proposals Due By May 31, 2020

Deadline Approaching: Proposals Due By May 31, 2020

Through a Glass Darkly: 

European History and Politics in Contemporary Crime Narratives

Monica Dall’Asta, Jacques Migozzi, Federico Pagello, Andrew Pepper eds.

To talk about the crime genre—as opposed to detective or spy or noir fiction—is to recognise the comprehensiveness of a category that speaks to and contains multiple sub-genres and forms (Ascari, 2007). In this volume, we want to uncover the ways in which the crime genre, in all of its multiple guises, forms and media/transmedia developments, has investigated and interrogated the concealed histories and political underpinnings of national and supranational societies and institutions in Europe, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

  

Two most popular expression of the crime genre, the detective novel and the spy novel, have long been identified as ‘sociological’ in their orientation (Boltanski, 2012). These forms often tackle enigmas or uncover conspiracies that are concealed by and within states, asking searching questions about the failures of democracy and the national and international criminal justice systems to deliver just societies. Similarly, following the example of U.S. hard-boiled fiction, the ‘noir’ variant of the genre has also established itself as a ‘literature of crisis’ (according to Jean-Patrick Manchette’s formula), where the shredding of official truths and of ‘reality’ itself ends up revealing dark political motives that elicit an even starker set of ethical and affective interrogations (Neveu, 2004). While the obvious links between the ‘noir’ and the ‘hard-boiled’ traditions of crime fiction (e.g. between Manchette and Hammett) suggest an American-French or trans-Atlantic connection, we are keen to stress that the sociological and political orientation of the European crime genre—especially since 1989 and the corresponding opening up of national borders and markets—requires examining both global/glocal and multi-national (and state-bound) issues and challenges. It is here that the European dimension of the proposed volume is best articulated because, to do justice to this context, we need to pay attention not just to discreet national traditions, but the ways in which contemporary iterations of the genre interrogate the workings of policing, law, criminality and justice across borders and nations (Pepper and Schmid, 2016).

The transnational framework of the DETECt project (Detecting Transcultural Identities in Popular European Crime Narratives) is necessarily and acutely concerned with civic and ethical issues linked to the construction of new European new identities. The proposed volume aims to explore the ways in which these new identities are formulated and thematised in European crime novels, films or TV series, particularly in relation to the interrogations raised by the uncovering of hidden aspects of both the historical past and the contemporary political landscapes. Contributions are encouraged which look at particular case studies or identify larger national and/or transnational trends or synthesise the relationship between individual texts and these larger trends. It is envisaged that the volume will be organised into the three sections outlined below. Prospective contributors are invited to identify where their articles might sit within this structure as well as to outline the particular focus adopted by their essay in relation to the general topic. The list of topics in each section is to be regarded as indicative rather than exhaustive. 

1. Crime Narratives and the History of Europe

European crime narratives from the last thirty years have frequently referred to collective traumas and conflicts that have torn European societies apart throughout the 20th century. Contributions are invited that look at the ways in which these fictional works have restaged and critically reinterpreted some of the most tragic pages in European recent history, including (but not limited to) the following iterations of violent rupture and social breakdown:

- The Civil War and Francoist dictatorship in Spanish crime narratives (e.g. Montalbán, La isla minima);

- Fascism, surveillance and the police-state (e.g. Lucarelli, Gori, De Giovanni) and the role of oppositional memory (e.g. Morchio, Dazieri) in Italian detective fiction; 

- Fascistic/right-wing nationalist movements in interwar Scandinavia (e.g. Larsson, Mankell);

- The Third Reich as the historical biotope of crime fiction (e.g. Kerr, Gilbers);

- The constant presence of wars as a breeding ground for crime in French crime novels: World War I and II, collaboration, the Algerian War, colonisation, post-colonisation (e.g. Daeninckx, Férey);

- The heavy presence of Cold War images and axiology in spy novels and films, including those appeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall, both in Western and Eastern Europe (e.g. Kondor, Furst);

- The ‘Troubles’ in Irish and British crime fiction (e.g. Peace, McNamee).

2. Crime Narratives and the Present of Europe

Our present time is characterized by a number of social, political, financial/economic crises that threaten the construction of a cosmopolitan pan-European identity in line with the EU’s founding ideals. Crime narratives attempt to offer realistic representations of such contemporary crises by putting in place a number of ‘chronotopes’ that symbolise social divisions and peripheral and marginalized identities. We encourage essays that examine the ways in which post-1989 European crime narratives have represented the emergence of nationalisms, xenophobia, racism and other threats to the social cohesiveness of European democracies. We also invite contributions that use the trope of the crisis to explore how the links between crime, business and politics have polluted or corrupted the democratic imperatives of European social democracies and institutions from the outset. Topics might include:  

- The Kosovo War, and more broadly the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, as the first signs of a generalised geopolitical chaos (e.g. in French noir novels);

- The financial crisis of 2008 and its devastating consequences for individuals, communities and whole societies (e.g. Bruen and French in Ireland; Markaris in Greece; Dahl in Sweden; Lemaître in France);

- The migrant crisis (within and outside the EU) and the emergence of new anxieties about belonging and/or otherness (e.g. Mankell, Dolan, Rankin);

- Climate change, pollution, and environmental destruction (e.g. Tuomainen, Pulixi);

- The blurring of crime and capitalism and the depiction of crime as a form of social protest vis-à-vis the effects of global capitalism and neoliberal deregulation and privatisation (e.g. Manotti, Carlotto, Heinichen, the TV series Bron);

- Inquiries into the effects of contemporary forms of patriarchy, gendered violence and misogyny and their links to other forms of oppression and domination (e.g. Lemaître, Slimani, Macintosh, Gimenez-Bartlett Larsson, McDermid).

3. Crime Narratives and the Future of Europe 

European crime narratives explore a broad range of social and cultural identities across different scales: from the more stable identities attached to local contexts through the new mobile, precarious and mutating identities fostered by the dynamics of globalization. This section will look into how these different identities and their complex interplay can suggest ways to frame the future of Europe. Contributions could address how crime narratives try to make sense of the complex, if yet perhaps contradictory, set of representations circulating across different European public spaces and collective imaginaries. On the one hand, we might ask whether something like a European crime genre even actually exists, given that these works typically demonstrate suspicions about ‘outsiders’ and only rarely offer positive representations of post-national transcultural identities. On the other hand, however, the genre does give us glimpses into what might be achieved through cross-border policing initiatives, organised under or by Interpol and Europol, in the face of organised crime gangs involved in transnational smuggling and trafficking networking. Contributions to this final section are encouraged to reflect upon how crime narratives produced by and in between the discreet nation-states frame the hopes and limits of European cohesiveness and the continent’s future or futures. Essays could focus on one or more of the following topics:

- The interplay between local, regional, national and transnational identities as represented through specific narrative tropes, such as in particular the local police station, the interrogation room, the frontier or border, and so on;

- The connection between social deprivation at the local end of the geopolitical scale and different global systems and networks at the other end;

- The role of borders, cities, violence, rebellion, policing and surveillance in producing new identities and subjectivities not wholly anchored in discreet nation-states. Attention could also be given to formal innovations insofar as these allow or enable the expression of new identities;

- The hope and consolation offered by the resilient community or village (Broadchurch, Shetland) or the extended family (Markaris’s Kostas Charistos series) in the face of the messy, brutal contingencies of a world ruled by criminal and business elites; 

- Social banditry as a form of contestation directed against social inequalities produced by capitalism (Carlotto’s Alligator series; La casa de papel). 

If you are interested in submitting a proposal to be considered for inclusion in this volume, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biography to info@detect-project.eu by May 31, 2020. We would encourage you to identify the section of the proposed volume where your essay would be best situated. We are looking to commission up to 14 essays in total of 7000 words each including footnotes and bibliographic references.

Quinta Jurecic on the Mueller Report as Detective Story @qjurecic @lawfareblog @lawfarepodcast

Quinta Jurecic, managing editor of Lawfare, compares the Mueller Report to a detective story, here, for the New York Times. She writes in part,

When the Mueller report was released, commentators reviewed it not only as a political and legal work but also as another genre: literature. In The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada described the report as “the best book by far on the workings of the Trump presidency.” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The Columbia Journalism Review that it held “the visceral drama of a detective novel, spy thriller, or legal procedural.” Laura Miller of Slate found it to be a work of “palace intrigues.”

...

The theatrical focus is a little much. But the literary critics are onto something. The report tells what is probably one of the biggest stories of our lifetimes — and understanding that narrative as a narrative can help make sense of the confused political moment. Exploring the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the writer Don DeLillo described in his novel “Libra” the endless work of sleuthing new information on the president’s death as an effort to draft the “book of America” — the novel “in which nothing is left out.” The same might be said of the Mueller report.

Susan Hennessey also hosts a podcast for Lawfare: The Report.

Davies on Sherlock Holmes: Expert Witness @GB2d

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, is publishing Sherlock Holmes: Expert Witness in Canon Law: Lawyers, Law and the Sherlockian Canon (William A. Walsh and Donny Zaldin, BSI Press, 2018). Here is the abstract.

This paper explains the treatment of expert witnesses in late-Victorian English courtrooms, using a scenario drawn from a Sherlock Holmes story -- “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” -- and a prosecution for murder.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Female Detectives In Queen Victoria's World @laphamsquart @oldrutigliano

Olivia Rutigliano reviews the world of the Victorian lady detective, here, for Lapham's Quarterly.

Conference on the Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama, January 8, 2019, University of Edinburgh @EdinburghUni

The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama: Day Conference, at the University of Edinburgh

Date of Event

8^th January 2019

Last Booking Date for this Event

4^th January 2019

Places Available

46

Description

The Bible has always enjoyed notoriety within the genres of crime fiction and drama; numerous authors have drawn on biblical traditions as thematic foci to explore social anxieties about violence, religion, and the search for justice and truth. This conference explores the issues raised by the forthcoming volume, The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama (Bloomsbury Press, 2019), which brings together multi-disciplinary scholarship from the fields of biblical interpretation, literary criticism, criminology, and studies in film and television to discuss international texts and media spanning the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

ICYMI: Lisa Hopkins on Shakespeare Allusion in Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2016)

ICYMI: Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University, has published Shakespeare Allusion in Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book explores why crime fiction so often alludes to Shakespeare. It ranges widely over a variety of authors including classic golden age crime writers such as the four ‘queens of crime’ (Allingham, Christie, Marsh, Sayers), Nicholas Blake and Edmund Crispin, as well as more recent authors such as Reginald Hill, Kate Atkinson and Val McDermid. It also looks at the fondness for Shakespearean allusion in a number of television crime series, most notably Midsomer Murders, Inspector Morse and Lewis, and considers the special sub-genre of detective stories in which a lost Shakespeare play is found. It shows how Shakespeare facilitates discussions about what constitutes justice, what authorises the detective to track down the villain, who owns the countryside, national and social identities, and the question of how we measure cultural value.

Calvo on Eduardo Mendoza's La Verdad Sobre el Caso Savolta @jcalvo11

Professor José Calvo of the University of Malaga Faculty of Law gave a lecture on Eduardo Mendoza's La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (Seix Barral, reprint 2011) (English: The Truth About the Savolta Case (1992)) at the University of Navarre on April 23. More here about the lecture.

Mr. Mendoza (born 1943) is also the author of several "anonymous detective" novels, in which the detective is a resident in a mental hospital. These include El misterio de la cripta embrujada (1978), El laberinto de las aceitunas (1982), La aventura del tocador de senoras (2001), El enredo de la bolsa y la vida (2012), and El secreto de la modelo extraviada (2015) (apologies for the omitted diacritical marks). 

ICYMI: Clare Clarke's Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock @victorianclare @Palgrave_

ICYMI: Clare Clarke, Trinity College Dublin, has published Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book investigates the development of crime fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, challenging studies of late-Victorian crime fiction which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures and have offered an over-simplified analytical framework, thereby overlooking the generic, moral, and formal complexities of the nascent genre.

Link to the US publisher's webpage here. 

"Where Do You Get Your Ideas?" @MphilPopLitTCD

A helpful page on exploring the possible influences on Victorian and Edwardian age crime and mystery writers in the UK using digital resources available through the New York Public Library. BTW, it's "Sir Arthur," not "Sir Doyle," as TCD MPhil Pop Lit @MphilPopLitTCD points out. Nevertheless, very interesting materials inviting readers to do their own investigations into the law and culture of policing and detecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In addition to Doyle, other turn of the 20th century and Golden Age writers who used real crime to inspire their novels include Edgar Allan Poe,

Here's a very selected bibliography of secondary works that discuss the subject.

The Cambridge Companion To Crime Fiction (Martin Edwards, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Guillaume Foussard, The Emergence of French Crime Fiction During the Nineteenth Century.

Stephen Knight, The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (McFarland, 2011).

Stephen Knight, Towards Sherlock Holmes: A Thematic History of Crime Fiction in the 19th Century World (McFarland, 2016).

J. Kingston Pierce, Gaslight and Gunplay: Digging Up Crime Fiction's 1800s Roots.

Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (2d ed.) (Penguin Books, 1986).



See also the Indiana University Libraries' excellent webpage on The First Hundred Years of Detective Fiction, 1841-1941 and the British Library's page on Crime and Crime Fiction.

Wesson on The Chow: Depictions of the Criminal Justice System as a Character In Crime Fiction @ColoLaw @alafairburke

Marianne Mimi Wesson, University of Colorado Law School, has published The Chow: Depictions of the Criminal Justice System as a Character in Crime Fiction at 51 New Eng. L. Rev. 101 (2017). Here is the abstract.

Having been honored by a request to contribute to a Symposium honoring my talented friend Alafair Burke, I composed this essay describing the various ways the criminal justice system has been depicted in English-language crime fiction. This survey, necessarily highly selective, considers portrayals penned by writers from Dickens to Tana French. Various dimensions of comparison include the authors’ apparent beliefs about the rule of law (from ridiculously idealistic to uncompromisingly cynical), the characters’ professional perspectives (private detective, police officer, prosecutor, defense lawyer, judge, victim, accused), and the protagonists’ status as institutional insiders or outsiders or occupants of the uncomfortable middle. The essay considers as well the protagonists’ insights (often useful, too often nonexistent) regarding issues of gender, race, and economic status — in their own professional lives, and as determinants of how one accused of a crime, or victimized by one, will experience the institutions of criminal justice. The essay concludes with some worried observations about what the election of Donald Trump may portend for crime fiction, in its likely corrosion of the rule of law and thus of the institutions of criminal justice.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: A Survey of the Legal Thriller From Lars Ole Sauerberg @Palgrave_

Lars Ole Sauerberg, University of Southern Denmark, has published The Legal Thriller From Gardner to Grisham (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book offers a critically informed yet relaxed historical overview of the legal thriller, a unique contribution to crime fiction where most of the titles have been written by professionals such as lawyers and judges. The legal thriller typically uses court trials as the suspense-creating background for presenting legal issues reflecting a wide range of concerns, from corporate conflicts to private concerns, all in a dramatic but highly informed manner. With authors primarily from the USA and the UK, the genre is one which nonetheless enjoys a global reading audience. As well as providing a survey of the legal thriller, this book takes a gender–focused approach to analyzing recently published titles within the field. It also argues for the fascination of the legal thriller both in the way its narrative pattern parallels that of an actual court trial, and by the way it reflects, frequently quite critically, the concerns of contemporary society.

If You Like Sherlock Holmes, You Might Also Like...

From the blog Interesting Literature, a list of ten literary detectives for those who like Sherlock Holmes. It includes such clever sleuths as C. L. Pirkis's Loveday Brooke and R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke. There's also E. W. Hornung's Dr. John Dollar. Hornung was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's nephew, and was the creator of the inimitable "gentleman-thief" Raffles, played on screen by Ronald Colman. 

You may also appreciate these rivals of Sherlock Holmes, collected in several volumes by various editors.

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Hugh Greene, ed., Penguin Books, 1972). DVD 2009.
The Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Hugh Greene, ed., Penguin Books, 1974). DVD 2010.
Cosmopolitan Crimes: Foreign Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Hugh Greene, ed., Penguin Books, 1972)
The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Hugh Greene, ed., Pantheon Books, 1976).
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Alan K. Russell, ed., Castle Books, 1978).
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Alan K. Russell, ed., Castle Books, 1979).

Burke on Why Novelists Write About the Criminal Justice System @alafairburke @Hofstra_Law

Alafair S. Burke, Hofstra University School of Law, is publishing Why Fiction? in the New England Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

When I sold my first novel the summer after my first year as a tenure-track law professor, I assured the dean of my law school that fiction was a hobby, completely separate from my academic work, no different than if a colleague were training for a marathon in her spare time. Fifteen years later, this symposium asks its participants - four of us published novelists, one of us a judge, all of us trained lawyers - to reflect on the depiction of the criminal justice system in fiction. Our contributions make clear that the promise I made to my dean was itself a type of fiction. Whether an author realizes it or not, it is impossible to create an interesting, albeit fictional, depiction of the criminal justice system without having something to say about its real-world counterpart. Successful legal fiction uses the legal system as a defining component of the narrative that feels entirely realistic, even if the plot that unfolds there is wholly fictional. To be of interest, a novel’s legal setting must serve a purpose. Legal detail should advance the development of character, plot, or atmosphere. Separate from the question of why a novelist might write about law is the question of why a legal professor might choose to write fiction. This symposium presses me to respond to that query. Fortunately, the five thoughtful and diverse essays contributed to this collection have helped clarify a decade and a half of my own thoughts. I appreciate the opportunity to comment on three themes that I hope I have developed at least as well through fiction as through traditional legal scholarship: (1) individual actors in the criminal justice system matter; (2) legal rules are only a starting point; and (3) justice is not inevitable. Comparing these three points to narrative, one could say that they provide lessons about character, structure, and surprise endings.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Del Gobbo on Unreliable Narration in Law and Fiction @danieldelgobbo

Daniel Del Gobbo has published Unreliable Narration in Law and Fiction, 30 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 311 (2017). Here is the abstract.

This article revisits long-standing debates about objective interpretation in the common law system by focusing on a crime novel by Agatha Christie and judicial opinion by the Ontario High Court. Conventions of the crime fiction and judicial opinion genres inform readers’ assumption that the two texts are objectively interpretable. This article challenges this assumption by demonstrating that unreliable narration is often, if not always, a feature of written communication. Judges, like crime fiction writers, are storytellers. While these authors might intend for their stories to be read in certain ways, the potential for interpretive disconnect between unreliable narrators and readers means there can be no essential quality that marks a literary or legal text’s meaning as objective. Taken to heart, this demands that judges try to narrate their decisions more reliably so that readers are able to interpret the texts correctly when it matters most.

CFP: John Grisham and the Law: The University of Memphis Law Review @uofmemphis

From the Mailbox: Via Andrew J. McClurg, University of Memphis School of Law:

CALL FOR PAPERS:  JOHN GRISHAM AND THE LAW

Rudy Baylor, a Memphis Law graduate, lost his new associate job before it even started when a bigger firm bought the firm that had hired him as a 3L.  Defeated, yet still determined to pursue a career in the law, Baylor accepted an associate job at an ambulance-chaser firm.  Little did young Baylor know that he would soon find himself litigating against a white-shoe law firm representing a health insurance monolith in an insurance claim—his very first case—that wound up being worth $50 million.

Of course, none of this actually happened in real life.  Twenty years ago, this tale unfolded on the silver screen in the 1997 major motion picture The Rainmaker, which brought to life author John Grisham’s novel of the same name.

We hope you will join us in celebrating John Grisham’s contributions to the law by submitting your articles on legal topics that arise in Grisham’s stories to The University of Memphis Law Review.  An ideal submission will frame its content with specific reference(s) to Grisham’s work(s) and will offer a practical legal argument.  We aim to publish accepted manuscripts in Volume 48, Number 3 of The University of Memphis Law Review.

John Grisham has repeatedly found ways to use his novels to offer incisive commentary on our profession and has popularized timeless themes of law and justice for the masses, in the South and elsewhere.  Topics could include, but are not limited to:

The Runaway Jury

·         Voir dire / jury tampering

·         Settlements and arbitration

·         Collateral estoppel

The Chamber

·         Death penalty and politics

·         Working with hostile clients

·         Ethical considerations when representing members of the same family

A Time to Kill

·         Race and the law

·         Law in the South

·         Vigilante justice

·         Hate crimes

·         Advocacy techniques

·         Right to a fair trial (venue, voir dire)

·         Capital punishment

The Client

·         Fifth Amendment issues

·         Witness-protection program

·         Attorney-client privilege

The Firm

·         Mail fraud

·         Moral obligations when you know your client is guilty

·         Moral and professional conflicts arising for junior associates

·         Balancing the obligation to maintain clients’ confidentiality with the obligation to comply with law enforcement’s demands

The Rainmaker

·         Attorney-client relationships

·         Self-defense justifications

·         Refusal to pay insurance claims

·         Punitive damages

·         Tort reform

Submission Protocol

To submit an entry to this themed book, please submit directly to Maggie McGowan, Senior Articles Editor at memphislawarticles@gmail.com with “Grisham Book” in the subject line.

A Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles

This item might make a great holiday gift for someone: it's a foldout map of Los Angeles showing points of interest mentioned in Raymond Chandler's novels. Put together by Herb Lester and published by Gestalten. 

I know it's a little early to be thinking about purchasing presents for the non-denominational holidays, but I shop all year, so...

Leading Female Detectives In Fiction

In the Guardian, Kristin Lepionka (The Last Place You Look) lists her choices for the top ten female detectives in fiction, including Tana French's Antoinette Conway and Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone. More here.

Poisoned Pen/British Library Bringing Back Many Golden Age Titles @PPPress @britishlibrary

If you like Golden Age mysteries and detective fiction, or works published in English prior to that period, check out the reprints published in the series British Library Crime Classics from Poisoned Pen Press and the British Library. This wonderful collection brings back famous works (think about those by Freeman Wills Crofts) and lesser known works that were still popular in their day and that are unjustly forgotten. There are pathbreakers (Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective from 1864) and collections of short stories (Continental Crimes, edited by Martin Edwards, who contributes both editing and introductions to a number of books in the series), as well as resurrections of the works of authors such as Lois Austen-Leigh, a collateral relative of Jane Austen.

Martin Edwards, who is well known for his own mystery novels, is also the author of The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, from Poisoned Pen.



Reasonable prices. Many of the titles are available in ebook format.