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.

Books

Goodreads Blurb

A retired botanist comes to stay in a charming English village, where murder and blackmail disturb the bucolic peace in this mystery series debut.

No longer on the sprightly side of seventy, Professor Andrew Basnett is looking forward to retirement and finally digging into the biography he plans to write about an obscure seventeenth century botanist. While his flat in town is renovated, he settles into a little village in Oxfordshire where he’s borrowed his nephew’s cottage. It sounds perfectly pleasant, even with the village murderess living right up the road.

Basnett’s nephew informs him that Pauline Hewison’s case never came to trial because she had the perfect alibi. Not entirely comforted, Basnett is more unnerved when a blizzard knocks out the power and provides a dark, snowy night just like the one six years ago when someone shot Charles Hewison through the head. It doesn’t help that there’s been another murder and that Pauline, once again, has motive to spare.

Something Wicked

Series: Andrew Basnett (#1)

218 pages, paperback

First published January 1, 1983. Published March 7, 2020 by Felony & Mayhem Press

Goodreads Blurb:

It was with a sense of resignation that Andrew Basnett, retired botany professor, accompanied an old friend to her home in a Berkshire village because her sister had received a blackmail letter. The letter had obviously been put in the wrong envelope, but it seemed to indicate that a murder had been committed in Lindleham, where, strangely, several people were missing from their homes. Had the old man really gone to visit his son in Australia? Was the little boy who had run away still alive? Had the doctor’s wife walked out on him, as he reported? What had happened to the businessman who failed to return from his mysterious work in the City and whom his wife believed to be working for MI5? Quietly Andrew investigates his friends’ neighbours and discovers situations of deepening complexity. Not the least disconcerting is the dawning realization that his friends too have something to hide. Elizabeth Ferrars is a mistress of mystification and shrewd observation. Both talents are employed with her usual skill in this latest addition to her considerable oeuvre.

The Other Devil’s Name

Series: Andrew Basnett (#4)

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986. Published May 24, 2021 by Felony & Mayhem Press.

eBook

Goodreads Blurb:

Nine short stories from one of the nation’s finest mystery authors
When her husband demands a divorce, a young wife heads to Reno alone, leaving the baby with her husband and his new beloved, betting that a week trapped between his child and his mistress will make her hubby yearn for her return. By the sea, a hairdresser gets into mischief over a star sports fisherman. And in a city threatened by conflict, a World War I veteran tries to make himself useful by enforcing the blackout.
These are just a few of the scenes from the short fiction of Mary Roberts Rinehart, who in these nine brief tales shows why she was one of the nation’s most popular authors for so many decades. Though famous as a mystery writer, Rinehart is just as much at home writing drama, or taking a witty look at the lighter side of law and order. More than a century since she published her first story, Rinehart’s prose remains as sharp as an assassin’s blade. 

Original title

Alibi for Isabel: And Other Stories

236 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1941. Published August 13, 2013 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road.

Goodreads Blurb:

The classic crime novel featuring blind detective Max Carrados, whose popularity rivalled that of Sherlock Holmes, complete with a new introduction and an extra short story. In his dark little curio shop Julian Joolby is weaving an extravagant scheme to smash the financial machinery of the world by flooding the Oriental market with forged banknotes. But this monster of wickedness has not reckoned on Max Carrados, the suave and resourceful investigator whose visual impairment gives him heightened powers of perception that ordinary detectives overlook. Max Carrados was a blind detective whose stories by Ernest Bramah appeared from 1914 alongside Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine , in which they often had top billing. Described by George Orwell as among ‘the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading’, the 25 stories were collected in three hugely popular volumes, culminating in a full-length novel, The Bravo of London (1934), in which Carrados engages in a battle of wits against a fiendish plot that threatens to overthrow civilisation itself. This Detective Club classic is introduced by Tony Medawar, who investigates the impact on the genre of Bramah’s blind detective and the relative obscurity of this, the only Max Carrados novel. This edition also includes the sole uncollected short story ‘The Bunch of Violets’. As well as on the page, the Max Carrados stories have been a firm favourite on television and film, played over the years by (among others) Robert Stephens, Simon Callow and Pip Torrens, and read on audio by Arthur Darvill and Stephen Fry.

The Bravo of London

272 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 20, 2018 by Collins Crime Club