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 first in a new series of classic detective stories from the vaults of HarperCollins involves a disappearing corpse, a supernatural theory, and a genuinely shocking finale.

“The Detective Story Club”, launched by Collins in 1929, was a clearing house for the best and most ingenious crime stories of the age, chosen by a select committee of experts. Now, almost 90 years later, these books are the classics of the Golden Age, republished at last with the same popular cover designs that appealed to their original readers.

“This most entertaining detective story is concerned with an amazing crime. The body of a wealthy man is discovered by his valet. The valet hurried to a friend of the dead man to tell him of the tragedy. They return to find the body gone! The motive of the murder becomes a deeper mystery still, and no clue seems to lead anywhere. Little by little, however, evidence is built up round a theory, and clever detective work triumphs in the end. For ingenuity and dramatic situations “The Mayfair Mystery” is hard to beat.”

First published in 1907 as 2835 Mayfair, the book had caught the imagination of the reading public for its thrilling twists, its wit and imagination, and was chosen to be one of the first 12 classic books released by the Club. This new edition comes with a brand new introduction about the history of the Detective Club by HarperCollins’ editor, David Brawn

Amazon

Series: None.

Publisher: Collins Crime Club.

Publication Date: August 13, 2015. Originally published in 1907.

Print length: 240 pages

Members of the Greene family keep dying while the pool of possible perpetrators keeps shrinking. Philo Vance—the independently wealthy, staggeringly brilliant, not remotely modest (and did we mention handsome?) amateur sleuth—uses his detective skills to unravel the murders, though sadly not before most of the Greene family has been bumped off. But that’s Our Philo: The Sleuth You Love to Hate.

Amazon

Series: Philo Vance (3)

Publisher: Felony & Mayhem

Publication Date: March 25, 2019. Originally published in 1928.

Print length 325 pages.

Purchased Print Books

‘The horror on the train, great though it may turn out to be, will not compare with the horror that exists here, in this house.’

On Christmas Eve, heavy snowfall brings a train to a halt near the village of Hemmersby. Several passengers take shelter in a deserted country house, where the fire has been lit and the table laid for tea―but no one is at home.

Trapped together for Christmas, the passengers are seeking to unravel the secrets of the empty house when a murderer strikes in their midst. This classic Christmas mystery is now republished for the first time since the 1930s, with an introduction by the award-winning crime writer Martin Edwards.

Amazon

Series: British Library Crime Classics.

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press.

Publication Date: October 4, 2016. Originally published in 1937.

Print length: 256 pages.