Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Stacking The Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga’s Reviews and Reading Reality, all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, whether physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical stores or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts, eBooks, and audiobooks.

Purchased eBooks

The bait is half of a $10,000 bill, delivered to Perry Mason by a man who promises the second half of the note should his companion, a silent masked woman, ever require the lawyer’s services. When a dead body is discovered soon after, Mason feels the hook―but how can one prove the innocence of a person whose identity is unknown? 
 
Suspecting he’s been set up, but curious nonetheless, Perry sets out to solve the mystery from the ground up, beginning with the face behind the veil. The more he learns, the more complex his investigation becomes. Uncovering a convoluted case of stock fraud, divorce, and inheritance, Mason’s nearly left reeling―that is until, with the help of Della Street and Paul Drake, he pulls off one of his most daring gambits ever to finally cast light on the killer.
 
Filled with memorable characters, a multitude of motives, and just a few red herrings, The Case of the Baited Hook is classic Perry Mason, showcasing the character’s brilliance and pizazz with a plot that pushes his powers into overdrive. As puzzling as it is entertaining, the book exemplifies the style that made Edgar Award winner Erle Stanley Gardner one of the most popular authors of the twentieth century and inspired the hit HBO series.

Amazon

Series: American Mystery Classic / Perry Mason.

Publisher: American Mystery Classic.

Publication Date: June 2, 2020.

Publication Length: 255 pages.

When a New York banker is discovered dead from an apparent morphine overdose in a Chicago hotel, the circumstances surrounding his untimely end are suspicious to say the least. The dead man had switched rooms the night before with a stranger he met and drank with in the hotel bar. And before that, he’d registered under a fake name at the hotel, told his drinking companion a fake story about his visit to the Windy City, and seemingly made no effort to contact the actress, performing in a local show, to whom he was married. All of which is more than enough to raise eyebrows among those who discovered the body.
 
Enter theatre critic and amateur sleuth Riley Blackwood, a friend of the hotel’s owner, who endeavors to untangle this puzzling tale as discreetly as possible. But when another detective working the case, whose patron is unknown, is thrown from a yacht deck during a party by an equally unknown assailant, the investigation makes a splash among Chicago society. And then several of the possible suspects skip town, leaving Blackwood struggling to determine their guilt or innocence―and their whereabouts.
 
Reissued for the first time in over eighty years, The Great Hotel Murder is a devilishly complex whodunnit with a classical aristocratic setting, sure to please Golden Age mystery fans of all stripes. In 1935, the story was adapted for a film of the same name

Amazon

Series: American Mystery Classic.

Publisher: American Mystery Classic.

Publication Date: September 1, 2020.

Publication Length: 242 pages.

When New Orleans coffee merchant Louis Durand first meets his bride-to-be after a months-long courtship by mail, he’s shocked that she doesn’t match the photographs sent with her correspondence. But Durand has told his own fibs, concealing from her the details of his wealth—so he mostly feels fortunate to find her so much more beautiful than expected. Soon after they marry, however, he becomes increasingly convinced that the woman in his life is not the same woman with whom he exchanged letters, a fact that becomes unavoidable when she suddenly disappears with his fortune.
 
Alone, desperate, and inexplicably lovesick, Louis quickly descends into madness, obsessed with finding Julia and bringing her to justice—and simply seeing her again. He engages the services of a private detective to do so, embarking on a search that spans the southeast of the country. When he finally tracks her down, the nightmare truly begins . . .
 
A dark tale of the destructive power of love, and the basis for a Francois Truffaut film, Waltz into Darkness is a classic femme-fatale narrative that shows the Edgar Award-winning “father of the modern suspense story” (Los Angeles Times) at the top of his unsettling craft.

Amazon

Series: American Mystery Classic.

Publisher: American Mystery Classic.

Publication Date: January 7, 2020.

Print Length: 340 pages.

Feline friends, canine companions and aviary associates are often the truest reflections of their owners and have played a crucial role in classic crime fiction—be they detectives, or delinquents. Martin Edwards reaches into the British Library of Crime Classics to collect mysteries featuring an animal cohort.

Guilty Creatures celebrates an often-overlooked species of classic crime fiction. Since the dawn of the crime fiction genre, animals of all kinds have played a memorable part in countless mysteries, and in a variety of roles: the perpetrator, the key witness, the sleuth’s trusted companion. This collection of fourteen stories corrals plots centered around cats, dogs, and insects alongside more exotic incidents involving gorillas, parakeets, and serpents—complete with a customary shoal of red herrings.

The collection includes an introduction on animals in detective fiction by Martin Edwards. “From the first detective story, Edgar Allan Poe’s locked room puzzle ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ onwards, animals, birds, and insects have played a memorable part in countless mysteries, and in a wide variety of ways. Count Fosco, the brilliantly characterized villain in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White was surrounded by “a cockatoo, two canary-birds and a whole family of white mice,” while the hound of the Baskervilles famously terrorised Dartmoor in Arthur Conan Doyle’s superb Sherlock Holmes novel. Since then, many crime writers have written about members of the animal kingdom.”

Amazon

Series: British Library Crime Classics

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Publication Date: June 7, 2022.

Print Length: 292 pages.

Library Loot

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder

‘As pretty a piece of work as Inspector French has done… On the level of Mr Crofts’ very best; which is saying something.’ ―Daily Telegraph

Dr James Earle and his wife live in comfortable seclusion near the Hog’s Back, a ridge in the North Downs in the beautiful Surrey countryside. When Dr Earle disappears from his cottage, Inspector French is called in to investigate. At first he suspects a simple domestic intrigue―and begins to uncover a web of romantic entanglements beneath the couple’s peaceful rural life.

The case soon takes a more complex turn. Other people vanish mysteriously, one of Dr Earle’s house guests among them. What is the explanation for the disappearances? If the missing people have been murdered, what can be the motive? This fiendishly complicated puzzle is one that only Inspector French can solve.

Freeman Wills Crofts was a master of the intricately and ingeniously plotted detective novel, and The Hog’s Back Mystery shows him at the height of his powers. This new edition of a classic mystery is introduced by the crime fiction expert Martin Edwards.

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Publication Date: June 7, 2015.

Print Length: 326 pages.

What books have entered your collection this week? If you have any favorite books you think I might like, leave them in the comments below.