The World's Finest Mystery Part 1

The World's Finest Mystery.

and Crime Stories.

Edited by Ed Gorman.

Dedicated to Janet Hutchings.

and Cathleen Jordan.

Acknowledgments.

Thanks to Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch, Maxim Jakubowski, Thomas Woertche, Lucy Suss.e.x and David Honeybone, and Edo van Belkom, for their informative summaries of the mystery field, and of course, to my editor at Forge Books, Jim Frenkel, and his able staff.

The Year in Mystery and Crime Fiction: 2000.

Jon L. Breen.

Call 2000 "The Year of the Puzzle." Even what century we were in was a puzzle: Was this the first year of the twenty-first, as millions of January 1 revelers including me chose to believe, or the last of the twentieth? (The answer has something to do with a binary system versus a decimal system, but I'm no mathematician.) Then there was the more significant math puzzle, with elements of the jigsaw: Who exactly was elected president of the United States? It took an extended squabble over dimpled chads, flexible deadlines, doctored absentee voter applications, and dueling supreme courts to decide.

But what, aside from providing promising plot material, did these real-life puzzles have to do with those created by writers of crime and mystery fiction, where the deductive puzzle beloved of traditionalists has been declining for decades? Though the formal detection of Ellery Queen and John d.i.c.kson Carr didn't make an unexpected comeback, that most maligned, patronized, and (with book buyers) popular of Golden Age icons, Agatha Christie, had a big year. She was voted the best crime writer of the century by the members.h.i.+p of the Anthony Boucher Memorial Mystery Convention (Bouchercon), held in Denver, and her Hercule Poirot novels were voted the best series. One of the year's secondary sources was an encyclopedic guide to her works, while another was a deconstructionist reconsideration of the plot of her most famous book. Christie even had a new novel this year- sort of. Spider's Web (St. Martin's Minotaur) was the third in a series of novelizations of her plays by Charles...o...b..rne.

Meanwhile, at the same mile-high convention, the Private Eye Writers of America gave their lifetime achievement award to master puzzlemaker Edward D. Hoch, a writer more a.s.sociated with impossible crimes and fair-play clues than blows to the head and rye bottles in the desk drawer.

Giving hope to the more literal-minded traditionalists, no less than two authors, Nero Blanc and Parnell Hall, were practicing the crossword-puzzle mystery, invented by Dorothy L. Sayers in the 1920s but produced since by the late Herbert Resnicow and few others.

With the growing blockbuster obsession of the major corporate book publishers, many readers and writers of bread-and-b.u.t.ter mystery fiction confronted another kind of puzzle: the maze they had to master to find each other.

Finally, one of the longstanding puzzles of crime and mystery fiction, but I don't know if it's a math puzzle, a word puzzle, a political puzzle, or (for those involved) another maze: Why have American and British markets shown such resistance to crime fiction from other languages and cultures? And why does the whole world seem to view the crime novel as an Anglo-American art form?

Early in 2000, during a visit to a national park in Chile, my wife and I learned that our tour guide was a mystery enthusiast who enjoyed a number of English-language writers in the original or in Spanish translation. After recommending some other writers she might enjoy, I asked her what contemporary Latin American crime writers she could recommend. She was unable to name a single one, indeed seemed to doubt there were any. The only one I could think of was Mexico's Paco Ignacio Taibo II, several of whose brilliant and offbeat novels have been published in the U.S.A., but surely there must be others.

It's true that the French, with Emile Gaboriau, Maurice Leblanc, and Gaston Leroux, have been accorded some historical importance, and at least some foreign-language writers have enjoyed a brief or extended vogue in Britain and America: Maigret's Belgian creator Georges Simenon, of course; the German author of Night of the Generals and other World War II fiction, Hans h.e.l.lmut Kirst; the Italian author of the bestseller The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco; the Swedish police proceduralist team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo; and a pair of Dutch authors, Robert van Gulik and Janwillem van der Wetering, both of whom wrote in English. Numerous others have at least occasionally cracked the English language market in translation: the Italian team of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini; several j.a.panese writers (Seicho Matsumoto, Masako Togawa, Edogawa Rampo); the French Frederic Dard (Sanantonio) and Hubert Monteilhet; the Russian Yulian Semyonov; the Spanish Manuel Vazquez Montalban; and the Scandinavians Poul Orum, Jan Ekstrom, and K. Arne Blom. Among the prominent foreign-language writers currently being published in English are Holland's Baantjer, many of whose DeKok novels have appeared in trade paperback translations from Intercontinental, and Sweden's Henning Mankell, whose novels about Kurt Wallander are published by The New Press. But the fact remains that the balance of trade in crime fiction has always favored English-language works.

In December 2000, Club Med sponsored a mystery-novel conference in the Bahamas that drew such distinguished American writers as Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, James Crumley, and Nevada Barr. Several foreign-language writers were also invited: Taibo of Mexico, Leonardo Padura of Cuba, Santiago Gamboas of Colombia, Laura Grimaldi of Italy; Thierry Jonquet, Chantal Pelletier, and Dominique Manotti of France; and Jose Angel Manas of Spain. A check of Amazon.com shows that of this group, only Taibo has any books available in English translation. The formation of the International Crime Writers a.s.sociation a few years ago, and its English-language anthologies, have helped to bring some international writers to the attention of English-language readers, but English-speaking countries continue to have a resistance to foreign writers that does not exist in other countries where English-language books in translation are popular. While you could say the same about English-language motion pictures, at least the best of foreign film can be expected to turn up with subt.i.tles at the big-city art houses. No such equivalent exists for foreign crime fiction.

THE WEB.

The discussion of internationalism leads conveniently to the increasing importance of the Internet as a source of up-to-date information. Quite often I get news of the mystery field in the U.S. and Great Britain first from a Web site that is maintained in j.a.pan: Jiro Kimura's The Gumshoe Site (www.nsknet.or.jp%jkimura). Another useful site, The Mysterious Homepage: A Guide to Mysteries and Crime Fiction on the Internet (www.webfic.com/mysthome/mysthome.htm) is maintained in Denmark by Jan B. Steffensen.

Some other sites I've found particularly valuable are Tangled Web U.K. (www.twbooks.co.uk), a great source of British reviews by H. R. F. Keating, Martin Edwards, Val McDermid, and other well-known author-critics; and the Thrilling Detective Web Site (www.thrillingdetective.com), a good stop for lovers of the hardboiled. My most exciting recent find, though, is Michael E. Grost's A Guide to Cla.s.sic Mystery and Detection (members.aol.com/mg4273/cla.s.sics.htm), which includes some contemporary subjects but is most valuable for its historical coverage. You'd be hard-pressed to find a print source that covers in such detail writers of the past like Lee Thayer, Octavus Roy Cohen, Burton E. Stevenson, Helen McCloy, and Lawrence G. Blochman.

BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR 2000.

The superlative "best" refers to those novels I have read and reviewed, which do not necessarily include all the worthy crime fiction of the year. However, I can recommend the fifteen books below without reservation, and I doubt anyone could find fifteen better. There's no common theme this time apart from the literary: The novels of Collins, Doughty, Engel, Stansberry, Taibo, and Westlake deal in a major or minor way with the doings of novelists, not such a surprising topic for novelists to be writing about.

Sarah Caudwell, The Sibyl in her Grave (Delacorte). The late author's final novel about Professor Hilary Tamar, whose gender must remain a mystery, is a literate, seriocomic puzzle for fans of Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin. Has any writer gained as formidable a reputation as Caudwell on the basis of four widely s.p.a.ced novels?

Max Allan Collins's The Hindenburg Murders (Berkley). The creator of the Saint, Leslie Charteris, is the sleuth in this recreation of a 1937 disaster from our best fictionalizer of twentieth-century mysteries.

K. C. Constantine, Grievance (Mysterious). With Rugs Carlucci succeeding Mario Balzic as central character, the series about the Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, police continues to feature complex relations.h.i.+ps, extraordinary dialogue, and unconventional mystery plotting.

Thomas H. Cook, Places in the Dark (Bantam). To say this cleverly crafted, lyrically written, time-s.h.i.+fting saga of two brothers from small-town coastal Maine bears comparison with the author's earlier Breakheart Hill and The Chatham School Affair should be recommendation enough.

Val Davis, Wake of the Hornet (Bantam). Archaeologist Nicolette (Nick) Scott, a specialist in the examination of historic aircraft, investigates a Pacific island mystery involving the Cargo Cults. This series started strong and has gotten better with each book.

Louise Doughty, An English Murder (Carroll & Graf). As the publisher's enthusiastic press releases emphasize, this is not your parents' English-village mystery. Subversive or not, it is a sensitive, complex, and remarkable novel.

Howard Engel, Murder in Montparna.s.se (Overlook). The sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of 1920s Paris come to life in this tale of the literary expatriate colony, first published in Canada in 1992.

Nicolas Freeling, Some Day Tomorrow (St. Martin's/Minotaur). An amazing novel from the viewpoint of a troubled, quirky, and brilliant retired Dutch botanist suspected of killing a teenage girl. Freeling always has been a specialized taste, but I'd recommend this one even to readers who could never warm up to series cops van der Valk and Castang.

Stuart M. Kaminsky, The Big Silence (Forge). Chicago policeman Abe Lieberman, one of the great characters of contemporary crime fiction, confronts a variety of personal and professional problems.

H. R. F. Keating, The Hard Detective (St. Martin's Minotaur). Tough woman detective Harriet Martens seeks a Biblically obsessed serial killer in a splendid police procedural from an unusual series- previous t.i.tles include The Rich Detective, The Good Detective, The Bad Detective, and The Soft Detective- joined by theme rather than a continuing character.

Elmore Leonard, Pagan Babies (Delacorte). Locales from Africa to Detroit and a pair of likably bent central characters combine for a model comic caper with a serious undertone.

Domenic Stansberry, Manifesto for the Dead (Permanent Press). A remarkable pastiche set in early-seventies Hollywood approximates Jim Thompson's style, while featuring the troubled novelist as the main character. (Another publication of interest to Thompson fans from the same small press is Mitch Cullin's chilling book-length poem, Branches.) Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Just Pa.s.sing Through, translated from the Spanish by Martin Michael Roberts (Cinco Puntos Press). A playful, unconventional, and astonis.h.i.+ng doc.u.mentary novel details the author's search for the truth about a Mexican anarchist and labor leader of the 1920s.

Donald E. Westlake, The Hook (Mysterious). In the grim vein of the author's great 1997 novel, The Ax, this tale of ghostwriting and murder brings the cutthroat publis.h.i.+ng scene to life- and death.

Laura Wilson, A Little Death (Bantam). Three cases of mysterious death spanning half a century in the life of a British family form the puzzle in one of the most original whodunits of recent years. Presented in the U.S. as a paperback original after a 1999 publication in Britain, this first novel is my choice for book of the year.

SUBGENRES.

Private-eye buffs had plenty to enjoy in 2000, including Amos Walker in Loren D. Estleman's A Smile on the Face of the Tiger (Mysterious), as distinguished as ever in style; newcomer Joe Barley, the academic gumshoe of Eric Wright's The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn (Perseverance); Sharon McCone in Marcia Muller's Listen to the Silence (Mysterious); Ivan Monk in Gary Phillips's Only the Wicked (Write Way); Spenser in Robert B. Parker's tongue-in-cheek racing mystery Hugger Mugger (Putnam); the Nameless Detective in Bill p.r.o.nzini's Crazybone (Carroll & Graf); and Sam McCain in Ed Gorman's Wake Up, Little Susie (Carroll & Graf).

Fans of the amateur detective should seek out Simon Brett's The Body on the Beach (Berkley), first in a new series about the English village of Fethering; Joan Hess's satirical A Conventional Corpse (St. Martin's Minotaur), in which bookseller Claire Malloy ventures among the crime writers; Val McDermid's Booked for Murder (Spinsters Ink), a case for journalist Lindsay Gordon first published in Britain in 1996; Lee Harris's latest holiday mystery, The Mother's Day Murder (Fawcett); and Nora DeLoach's Mama Pursues Murderous Shadows (Bantam), about small-town South Carolina social worker Grace (Candi) Covington. Though Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled (Ballantine) concerns a spy rather than a sleuth, it fits well in this cozy company.

Those in search of the cla.s.sical puzzle-spinning of the "Golden Age" can look to Parnell Hall's Cora Felton in her second crossword case, Last Clue & Puzzlement (Bantam); and Francis M. Nevins's Loren Mensing in the Queenian Beneficiaries' Requiem (Five Star), plus a bunch of British cops: Paul Charles's Christy Kennedy in the locked-room problem, The Ballad of Sean and Wilko (Do-Not/Dufour); Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond in The Vault (Soho); Graham Thomas's Erskine Powell in Malice in London (Fawcett); and of course Colin Dexter's Chief Inspector Morse in his final case, The Remorseful Day (Crown), though it's more notable as a character study than a puzzle.

Police detectives from outside the cla.s.sical tradition who were in strong form include James Lee Burke's Dave Rob.i.+.c.heaux in Purple Cane Road (Doubleday), and Ken Bruen's Brant and Roberts in the satirical Taming the Alien (Do-Not/Dufour).

Historicals continue to have a growing mystery-market share. Anne Perry's two Victorian series, though not at their peak, were well enough represented by Slaves of Obsession (Ballantine), about William Monk, Hester Latterly, and Sir Oliver Rathbone; and Half Moon Street (Ballantine), about Thomas Pitt with wife Charlotte mostly offstage. A good addition to the continuing Watsonian pastiche industry was Val Andrews's Sherlock Holmes at the Varieties (Breese), one of several from this prolific author and publisher. Conrad Allen's Cunard Line detectives put to sea again in Murder on the Mauretania (St. Martin's Minotaur), about a 1907 maiden voyage. Steven Saylor's Last Seen in Ma.s.silia (St. Martin's Minotaur) is an exception to the general rule that Roman detectives like Gordia.n.u.s the Finder shouldn't venture out of town. In an example of the past/present hybrid, William J. Mann's The Biograph Girl (Kensington) speculates that pioneering movie star Florence Lawrence didn't really die by suicide in 1938.

Considering that the second edition of my Novel Verdicts: A Guide to Courtroom Fiction (Scarecrow) was published early in the year (officially 1999 per the t.i.tle page), I spent surprisingly little time in the company of the lawyer detectives, but I can recommend Andrew Pyper's first novel, Lost Girls (Delacorte); and Gini Hartzmark's noncourtroom Dead Certain (Fawcett) to my fellow legal buffs.

SHORT STORIES.

The best book in an extraordinary year for single-author collections was Carolyn Wheat's Tales out of School (Crippen & Landru), which displays the lawyer-author's astonis.h.i.+ng craftsmans.h.i.+p and versatility to maximum advantage. Close runners-up were the first two collections by Clark Howard, published within months of each other: Crowded Lives and Other Stories of Desperation and Danger (Five Star) and Challenge the Widow-Maker and Other Stories of People in Peril (Crippen & Landru).

Others of special merit from Crippen & Landru included Michael Collins's second volume of Dan Fortune private-eye stories, Fortune's World; Edward D. Hoch's The Velvet Touch (Crippen & Landru), about thief-of-the-valueless Nick Velvet; Marcia Muller's McCone and Friends, in which members of the San Francisco private eyes' extended family of co-workers take center stage; and Hugh B. Cave's Long Live the Dead, gathering the venerable writer's Black Mask stories. Among Five Star's notable offerings were Barbara D'Amato's Of Course You Know that Chocolate Is a Vegetable and Other Stories; Lia Matera's Counsel for the Defense and Other Stories; d.i.c.k Lochte's Lucky Dog and Other Tales of Murder; and two collections by Evan Hunter/Ed McBain: Barking at b.u.t.terflies and Other Stories and Running from Legs and Other Stories. Other publishers got into the act with Lawrence Block's 754-page The Collected Mystery Stories (Orion/Trafalger); and Peter Sellers's Whistle Past the Graveyard (Mosaic).

It was also a strong year for multiauthor collections. As you might expect at the close of a century, chubby historical reprint anthologies were numerous. Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler edited The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin). Anne Perry edited a British equivalent, A Century of British Mystery and Suspense (Mystery Guild), to which I was honored to provide an introduction. Ed Gorman and I edited Sleuths of the Century (Carroll & Graf), which included authors of both nationalities plus Georges Simenon.

Star-studded original anthologies of note included the Adams Round Table's Murder Among Friends (Berkley); the Private Eye Writers of America's The Shamus Game (Signet), edited by that organization's indefatigable founder, Robert J. Randisi; the Mystery Writers of America's The Night Awakens (Pocket), edited by Mary Higgins Clark; and Crime Through Time III (Berkley), edited by Sharan Newman. More concentrated on newer names was the Brit noir volume Fresh Blood 3 (Do-Not/Dufour), edited by Mike Ripley and Maxim Jakubowski.

The Tennessee publisher c.u.mberland House became a key player in the anthology game with theme volumes both original (Murder Most Confederate, edited by Martin H. Greenberg; and Murder Most Medieval, edited by Greenberg and John Helfers) and reprint (Opening Shots: Great Mystery and Crime Writers Share Their First Published Stories, edited by Lawrence Block; and Murder Most Delectable, edited by Greenberg).

My favorite anthology of the year, combining old stories and originals with an editorial apparatus of genuine reference value was Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (Carroll & Graf). As with other volumes in the publisher's Mammoth series, though, I wish it were in more permanent form, i.e., hardcovers and better paper.

See Edward D. Hoch's bibliography for the year's full story on both anthologies and single-author collections.

REFERENCE BOOKS AND SECONDARY SOURCES.

Book of the year in this category was surely Marvin Lachman's The American Regional Mystery (Crossover Press), a criminous cross-country tour by one of the most knowledgeable, readable, and reliable commentators on crime fiction.

Also of note are the collection of Charles Willeford's essays, Writing & Other Blood Sports (Dennis McMillan); Hugh Merrill's The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D. MacDonald (St. Martin's Minotaur), which has undeniable value despite indifferent writing and a lousy t.i.tle; Martha Hailey DuBose's Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists (St. Martin's Minotaur); Otto Penzler's 101 Greatest Films of Mystery and Suspense (Simon & Schuster); and Matthew Bunson's The Complete Christie: An Agatha Christie Encyclopedia (Pocket), doing a job you may think is redundant, but doing it well. A more original Christie volume, though one less likely to appeal to a wide readers.h.i.+p, was Pierre Bayard's Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (New Press), translated from the French by Carol Cosman- if you can wade through the academic jargon, Bayard has an interesting theory to promote.

They Wrote the Book: Thirteen Women Mystery Writers Tell All (Spinsters Ink), edited by Helen Windrath, is both a valuable technical manual for writers and entertaining reading for fans; while the Independent Mystery Booksellers a.s.sociation's 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century (Crum Creek), edited by Jim Huang, provides a good reading list, heavy on authors of the '80s and '90s, with commentary.

Again, Ed Hoch's bibliography will provide the full story.

A SENSE OF HISTORY.

Rue Morgue Press publishers Tom and Enid Schantz continued to reprint worthy writers of the past, including the first American edition of Joanna Cannan's 1939 novel They Rang Up the Police, an outstanding piece of cla.s.sical detective fiction that can stand comparison with Allingham, Marsh, Sayers, and other Golden Age icons; and Juanita Sheridan's The Chinese Chop, the 1949 novel that introduced Chinese American sleuth Lily Wu, whose other three cases are on Rue Morgue's future schedule.

Five Star brought us new editions, with an introduction by the author, of Donald E. Westlake's first two Mitch.e.l.l Tobin novels, Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (1966) and Murder Among Children (1967), originally published as by Tucker Coe; while Vera Caspary's 1943 cla.s.sic Laura became the first in a series, edited by Otto Penzler for ibooks, of mysteries that became Hollywood films. The e-books/books-on-demand phenomenon allowed contemporary writers like Stuart M. Kaminsky, d.i.c.k Lochte, Annette Meyers, and Loren D. Estleman to make their backlists available to readers, a trend that can be expected to grow.

AT THE MOVIES.

The quality of 2000's crime and mystery movies was far below that of 1999's b.u.mper crop, but there were some good ones, mostly playing the art houses rather than the multiplexes. Best crime film released in the U.S.A. during the year was probably the 1998 British film noir Croupier, directed by Mike Hodges from Paul Mayersberg's script and boasting a great performance by Clive Owen as the t.i.tle character, a bored writer who takes a casino job that leads him into a web of crime. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola, who also wrote the screenplay from Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel, is a dark coming-of-age story about the hidden horrors of suburbia and a rare example of the pure whydunit. Writer-director Rod Lurie's The Contender, like his 1999 film Deterrence, shows him as a nimble plotter in the political thriller vein. Under Suspicion, directed by Stephen Hopkins and scripted by Tom Provost and W. Peter Iliff from (via an earlier French version) John Wainwright's 1979 novel Brainwash, may be somewhat stagy in feel, but it's cunningly constructed and makes a great vehicle for the talents of Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman. Gregory Hoblit's Frequency, written by Toby Emmerich, is a suspenseful mystery/science-fiction hybrid: time travel meets get-the-serial-killer.

Some of the crime films I admired during the year were less well-received by critics, so take these recommendations with a grain of salt. The Harrison Ford/Mich.e.l.le Pfeiffer vehicle What Lies Beneath, directed by Robert Zemeckis from Clark Gregg's screenplay, struck me as an admirably tricky variation of the Before the Fact am-I-married-to-a-murderer plot. Director Nick Gomez's Drowning Mona, written by Peter Steinfeld, is a tongue-in-cheek small-town black comedy asking which of several reasonable suspects murdered the poisonous t.i.tle character played by Bette Midler. The Yards, James Gray's downbeat film of civic corruption (scripted with Matt Reeves), had a terrific cast and should have done better at the box office than it did. Where the Money Is, the enjoyable caper movie in which ex-con Paul Newman impersonates a stroke victim, had three screenplay writers (E. Max Frye, Topper Lilien, and Carroll Cartwright, from Frye's story) and was directed by Marek Kanievska. (Is Newman embarked on a series of senior-citizen variations on crime-fiction conventions? This one follows his 1998 "geezer noir" private-eye vehicle, Twilight. I liked that one, too, though not everybody did.) Up at the Villa, directed by Philip Haas and scripted by Belinda Haas from a Somerset Maugham novella, qualifies as a crime story and a highly entertaining one for those who value the sedate and understated approach to high emotion.

A 2000 Yearbook of Crime and Mystery.

compiled by Edward D. Hoch.

Collections and Single Stories.

(Anonymous). Herlock Shomes At It Again. New York: The Mysterious Bookshop. A single twenty-page parody first published in 1918. One of the Mysterious Sherlock Holmes series.

BISHOP, PAUL. Pattern of Behavior. Unity, Maine: Five Star. Fourteen stories, including one new novelette, from various sources, 19822000.

BRACKEN, MICHAEL. Bad Girls: One Dozen Dangerous Dames Who Lie, Cheat, Steal, and Kill. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press. Twelve stories, two new, from Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and other sources.

---. Tequila Sunrise: Hardboiled P. I. Nathaniel Rose: Bullets, Booze, and Broads. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press. Seven stories, two new, from various sources.

BREEN, JON L. The Drowning Icecube and Other Stories. Unity, Maine: Five Star. Seventeen stories, 197799, mainly detection, including three parodies and one mystery-fantasy.

BRETT, SIMON. A Crime in Rhyme and Other Mysterious Fragments. Burpham, West Suss.e.x, U.K.: Frith House. A rhyming playlet and seven brief pieces supposedly written by well-known authors.

BRIETMAN, GREGORY. The Marriage of Sherlock Holmes. New York: The Mysterious Bookshop. A 1926 parody of twenty-eight pages, translated from the Russian. One of the Mysterious Sherlock Holmes series.

Ca.s.sIDAY, BRUCE. None but the Vengeful: Cla.s.sic Pulp Crime and Suspense. Brooklyn: Gryphon Books. Eight stories and novelettes from the pulps, 194852. Introduction by Gary Lovisi.

CAVE, HUGH B. Bottled in Blonde: The Peter Kane Detective Stories. Minneapolis: Fedogan & Bremer. Nine tales from Dime Detective. Introduction by Don Hutchinson.

---. Danse Macabre. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. A single short story from Clues Detective Stories, 4/37, in a pamphlet accompanying the limited edition of Long Live the Dead.

---. The Lady Wore Black and Other Weird Cat Tails. Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash-Tree Press. Nineteen fantasy tales, some from Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Mystery Magazine. Introduction by Mike Ashley.

---. Long Live the Dead. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. All ten of Cave's stories from Black Mask, 193441, with an introduction and interview with the author by Keith Alan Deutsch.

---. Officer Coffey Stories. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press. Two stories from Dime Detective, 1940.

COEL, MARGARET. Stolen Smoke. Mission Viejo, CA: A.S.A.P. Publis.h.i.+ng. A single limited-edition short story, fourth in a series, about an Arapaho Native American sleuth. Introduction by Marcia Muller.

COLLINS, BARBARA. Too Many Tomcats and Other Feline Tales of Suspense. Unity, Maine: Five Star. Eleven cat stories, two new and one in collaboration with husband, Max Allan Collins, who contributes the introduction.

COLLINS, MICHAEL. Fortune's World. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. Fourteen stories, one new, one first American publication, 19652000, about private eye Dan Fortune. Introduction by Richard Carpenter.

---. The Dreamer. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. A single Slot-Machine Kelly story from Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, 9/62, in a pamphlet accompanying the limited edition of Fortune's World.

D'AMATO, BARBARA. Of Course You Know Chocolate Is a Vegetable and Other Stories. Unity, Maine: Five Star. Twelve stories, 199199, from various sources.

DE NOUX, O'NEIL. Hollow Point/The Mystery of Roch.e.l.le Marais. Brooklyn: Gryphon Books. Two new police stories and a historical mystery from EQMM, all set in New Orleans.

DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN. The Surgeon of Gaster Fell. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. A pamphlet containing the original magazine text of a Doyle novelette, later revised for book publication. Afterword by Daniel Stashower. A limited edition published for Malice Domestic XII.

DUNDEE, WAYNE D. & DEREK MUK. Tuck Tip & Three Parts. Brooklyn: Gryphon Books. Two private-eye novelettes by Dundee, one new, teamed with three stories by Muk about San Francisco cops.

ESTLEMAN, LOREN D. The Midnight Man. New York: ibooks. Reprint of a 1982 novel with an Amos Walker short story, "Redneck," appended.

Fa.s.sBENDER, TOM & JIM PASCOE. Five Shots and a Funeral: The Short Fiction of Das.h.i.+ell Loveless. Los Angeles: Uglytown. Five connected stories by fictional author Das.h.i.+ell Loveless.

FORTUNE, DION. The Secrets of Dr. Taverner. Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash-Tree Press. Complete collection of all twelve stories about an occult detective, six published in Royal Magazine (London) during 1922. The third of a continuing series, Ash-Tree Press Occult Detectives Library, edited and introduced by Jack Adrian.

GILBERT, MICHAEL. The Mathematics of Murder: A Fearne & Bracknell Collection. London: Robert Hale. Fourteen stories about law partners and their firm, some new, 19952000.