Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Amazon synopsis:

Dr. Edmund Bickleigh married above his station. Although popular and well respected in his little Devonshire community, he seethes with resentment at the superior social status of his domineering wife, Julia. Bickleigh soothes his inferiority complex by seducing as many of the local women as he possibly can — but with the collapse of his latest fling and a fresh dose of sneering contempt from Julia, the doctor resolves to silence his wife forever and begins plotting the perfect murder.

Goodreads synopsis:

One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor – enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service.

Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home.

Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who’s as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz.

Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself a the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne is brusque, temperamental and annoying but even so his latest case with its many twists and turns proves irresistible. The writer and the detective form an unusual partnership. At the same time, it soon becomes clear that Hawthorne is hiding some dark secrets of his own.

A masterful and tricky mystery that springs many surprises, The Word is Murder is Anthony Horowitz at his very best.

Goodreads synopsis:

Naples, March 1931: a bitter wind stalks the city streets, and murder lies at its chilled heart. As one of the world s greatest tenors, Maestro Vezzi, is found brutally murdered in his dressing room at Naples famous San Carlo Theatre, the enigmatic and aloof Commissario Ricciardi is called in to investigate. Arrogant and bad-tempered, Vezzi was hated by many, but with the livelihoods of the opera at stake, who would have committed this callous act? Ricciardi, along with his loyal colleague, Maione, is determined to discover the truth. But Ricciardi carries his own secret: will it help him solve this murder?

Goodreads synopsis:

Ricciardi has visions. He sees and hears the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths. It is both a gift and a curse. It has helped him become one of the most acute and successful homicide detectives in the Naples police force. But all that horror and suffering has hollowed him out emotionally. He drinks and doesn’t sleep. Other than his loyal partner Brigadier Maione he has no friends.

Naples, 1931. In a working class apartment in the Sanita’ neighborhood an elderly woman by the name of Carmela Calise has been beaten to death. When Ricciardi and Maione arrive at the scene they start asking the neighbors questions. No one wants to talk but slowly a few interesting facts slip out. Carmela Calise was moonlighting as a fortuneteller and moneylender. In her decrepit apartment she would receive clients, among them some of the city’s rich and powerful, predicting their futures in such a way as to manipulate and deceive. If economic ruin lurked in their futures, Calise was happy to help. For a price, of course. She had many enemies, those indebted to her, manipulated by her lies, disappointed by her prophesies or destroyed by her machinations. Murder suspects in this atmospheric thriller abound and Commissario Ricciardi, one of the most original and intriguing investigators in contemporary crime fiction, will have his work cut out for him.

Goodreads synopsis:

Book three in the Commissario Ricciardi series. Naples 1931. Together with his indefatigable partner, Brigadier Maione, Ricciardi, a man driven into solitude by his paranormal �gift” of seeing the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths—a talent that also makes him a highly effective investigator—is conducting an investigation into the death of the beautiful and mysterious Duchess of Camparino, whose connections to Neapolitan privileged social circles and the local fascist elite make the case a powder keg waiting to blow.

Goodreads synopsis:

In this fourth installment of the internationally successful Commissario Ricciardi series, the Commissario is investigating the death of Matteo, one of the many street urchins who live hand-to-mouth in the dark alleys of 1930s Naples. While at first the death seems provoked by natural causes, it quickly emerges that there’s more to the tragedy than meets the eye.

Goodreads synopsis:

A new series of hardboiled crime fiction set in contemporary Naples by the author of the internationally bestselling Commissario Ricciardi series. 

They’ve made a fresh start at the Pizzofalcone precinct of Naples. They fired every member of the investigative branch after they were found guilty of corruption. Now, there’s a group of detectives, a new commissario, and a new superintendent. The new cops immediately find themselves investigating a high-profile murder that has the whole town on edge.

Heading the investigation is Inspector Lojacono, known as “the Chinaman,” a cop with a checkered past who is currently riding a reputation as a crack investigator after having captured a serial killer known as “The Crocodile.” Lojacono’s partner is Aragona, who wants to be known as “Serpico,” but the name doesn’t stick. Luigi Palma, a.k.a. “Gigi,” is the Commissario, Francesco Romano, known as “Hulk,” is the slightly self-deluded lieutenant. Lojacono, Aragona, Palma, and Romano are joined by a cast of cops portrayed by bestselling author Maurizio de Giovanni with depth and intimate knowledge of the close-knit world of police investigators. 

De Giovanni is one of the most dexterous and successful writers of crime fiction currently working in Europe. His award winning and bestselling novels, all set in Naples, offer a brilliant vision of the criminal underworld and the lives of the cops in Europa’s most fabled, atmospheric, dangerous, and lustful city.

Goodreads synopsis:

The second title in de Giovanni’s new series set in contemporary Naples. A child is kidnapped. A high-class apartment is burgled. The two crimes seem to have no connection at all until Inspector Lojacono, known as “the Chinaman”, starts to investigate.
De Giovanni is one of the most dexterous and successful writers of crime fiction currently working in Italy. His award winning and bestselling novels, all set in Naples, offer a brilliant vision of the criminal underworld and the police that battle it in Europe’s most fabled, atmospheric, dangerous, and lustful city.
The Bastards of Pizzofalcone is a new series set in contemporary Naples that draws inspiration from Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels and features a large cast of cops doing battle with ruthless criminals, as well as their own demons.

Goodreads synopsis:

Badger’s Drift is an ideal English village, complete with vicar, bumbling local doctor, and kindly spinster with a nice line in homemade cookies. But when the spinster dies suddenly, her best friend kicks up an unseemly fuss, loud enough to attract the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby. And when Barnaby and his eager-beaver deputy start poking around, they uncover a swamp of ugly scandals and long-suppressed resentments seething below the picture-postcard prettiness. In the grand tradition of the quietly intelligent copper, Barnaby has both an irresistibly dry sense of humor and a keen insight into what makes people tick.

Goodreads synopsis:

House-sitting at their aunt’s stately Madingley Grange, Simon Hannaford and his sister Laurie assemble a group of wealthy eccentrics for a weekend of recreational murder and mayhem, never imagining that their playacting would become very real. 

Goodreads synopsis:

How acute are your powers of perception? Do they begin to match those of Gervase Fen, Oxford don and sleuth supreme?

First published in 1953, Beware of the Trains is a collection of sixteen short mysteries. Fen must link a missing train conductor to the murder of a thief, decipher cryptograms to solve the death of a cipher expert and puzzle out a locked-room mystery on Boxing Day.

Erudite and complex, these Gervase Fen cases are classic crime at its plot, atmosphere and anecdote, bound together by Edmund Crispin’s inimitable wit and charm.

Goodreads synopsis:

The film on which Professor Gervase Fen has been hired to consult, though, is a biography of the poet Alexander Pope. But however high-minded the subject-matter, the actual process of making the movie is a grubby business, from the young actresses of dubious morality to the stogie-chomping cameramen, perpetually threatening to strike. And?to Fen’s evident delight?even the showbiz glamour can’t prevent murder from muscling its way onto the scene.

Goodreads synopsis:

The little village of Cotton Abbas is home to both an irritating influx of England’s newly rich and a deliciously weird clutch of long-time locals. Chief among the latter: Colonel Babbington, whose cat, Lavender, is remarkably clumsy and also convinced that he is responsible for saving the world from a Martian invasion. Lavender may be a little? odd, to say the least, but his unusual psychic gifts prove unexpectedly helpful to Fen (visiting incognito) as he attempts to discover who is responsible for the village’s epidemic of ugly anonymous letters.

Goodreads synopsis:

Professor Gervase Fen is in Devon working on his masterpiece critique of the modern novel, but keeps getting distracted – by the local animals (several pigs, a mildly insane cat, a horse with sleeping sickness), by the spectacular failures of the local electrical board, by the vicar’s practical jokes, by the retired major yearning for another jolly war. Oh, and by the dismembered body, found in a nearby field, whose head keeps turning up in the most unlikely places.

Goodreads synopsis:

The Clayborn clan has been waiting 25 years to divvy up Grandmama’s fortune, locked up by her will, and to open a small room in the Clayborn mansion. Tomorrow The Room is to be opened, and the Clayborns can’t wait to get their fingers on the old lady’s reportedly priceless button collection. Harriet Clayborn, who doesn’t quite trust her family, asks Henry Gamadge to witness the Opening of The Room, to make sure there’s no funny business. Gamadge agrees, and it’s a good thing this masterful sleuth is on hand: the Room has been hiding something grislier than buttons.

Goodreads synopsis:

An amateur sleuth with an eye for fakes is on the lookout for a murderer in this mystery by Agatha Christie’s favorite American author.

What begins as a courtesy call on his wife’s friend, Miss Julia Paxton, turns into another case for Henry Gamadge, antiquarian book dealer, handwriting expert, and amateur detective. Miss Paxton presents Gamadge with a a framed etching that had always hung in the hallway of the Ashbury mansion has suddenly sprung an inscription dated 1793. Miss Paxton swears nothing had been written on that portrait before the previous Sunday. Did Iris Vance, a relative and professional medium, made it happen? And how? Henry Gamadge is pretty sure the solution to this mystery has nothing to do with the supernatural, but he can’t quite make out what it all means. Was it a joke? Petty larceny? Or is something much more dangerous going on, and has Gamadge somehow stumbled onto a criminal conspiracy?

Goodreads synopsis:

A body is discovered in a Milan apartment, and Inspector De Vincenzi investigates. The apartment happens to belong to an old university friend of his, Aurigi. When the body turns out to be that of Aurigi’s banker, and a phial of prussic acid is discovered in the bathroom, suspicion falls on the apartment’s owner, and De Vincenzi is agonisingly torn between his sense of duty and his loyalty to an old comrade…

This intensely dramatic mystery from the father of the Italian crime novel, Augusto de Angelis, is the first to feature his most famous creation–Inspector De Vincenzi.

Goodreads synopsis:

The notorious Inspector Di Vincenzi returns in this cryptic murder mystery teeming with blackmail, deceit, and revenge

Death is in the air at one of Milan’s great fashion houses. As a new collection is unveiled, and the wealthy rub shoulders with the glamorous, owner Cristiana O’Brian escapes upstairs to discover the strangled body of her servant slumped on her bed–a single orchid by his side.

When Inspector Di Vincenzi is called in to investigate, the brilliant detective is puzzled. Why is Cristiana behaving so suspiciously? And what is her estranged ex-husband doing there? As two additional corpses appear, each accompanied by an orchid, Di Vincenzi must see through dirty tricks and slippery clues in order to uncover the real killer.

Goodreads synopsis:

Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau is taking a vacation, in part because he is annoyed at his boss, Party Secretary Li, but also because he has been made an offer he can’t refuse by Gu, a triad-connected businessman. For what seems to be a fortune—with no apparent strings attached— he is to translate a business proposal for the New World, a complex of shops and restaurants to be built in Central Shanghai, evoking nostalgia for the “glitter and glamour” of the 1930s.

It is up to Detective Yu, Chen’s partner, to take charge of a new case. Yin, a novelist, has been murdered in her room. At first it seems that only a neighbor could have committed the crime, but when one confesses, Yu cannot believe that he is really the killer. As Yu looks further into Yin’s life, ample motives begin to surface, even on the part of Internal Security. But it is only when Inspector Chen steps back into the investigation that the culprit is apprehended. And then Chen discovers how Gu has played him and how he, in turn, can play the new capitalist system.

Goodreads synopsis:

A novel based on the forgotten true story of one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs.

Constance Kopp doesn’t quite fit the mold. She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters into hiding fifteen years ago. One day a belligerent and powerful silk factory owner runs down their buggy, and a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks, bullets, and threats as he unleashes his gang on their family farm. When the sheriff enlists her help in convicting the men, Constance is forced to confront her past and defend her family — and she does it in a way that few women of 1914 would have dared.  

Goodreads synopsis:

Life after the war takes an unexpected turn for the Kopp sisters, but soon enough, they are putting their unique detective skills to use in new and daring ways. 

Winter 1919: Norma is summoned home from France, Constance is called back from Washington, and Fleurette puts her own plans on hold as the sisters rally around their recently widowed sister-in-law and her children. How are four women going to support themselves? 

A chance encounter offers Fleurette a clandestine legal work for a former colleague of Constance’s. She becomes a “professional co-respondent,” posing as the “other woman” in divorce cases so that photographs can be entered as evidence to procure a divorce. While her late-night assignments are both exciting and lucrative, they put her on a collision course with her own family, who would never approve of such disreputable work. One client’s suspicious behavior leads Fleurette to uncover a much larger crime, putting her in the unlikely position of amateur detective.  

In  Miss Kopp Investigates, Amy Stewart once again brilliantly captures the women of this era—their ambitions for the future as well as the ties that bind—at the start of a promising new decade.  

Goodreads synopsis:

?Pig? Peters made Albert Campion?s life a misery at prep school, and now that he?s dead, Campion is hard-pressed to squeeze out a tear. Still, he does attend the funeral. Not because he much regrets the passing of the Pig, but because he got an intriguingly anonymous invitation and Campion never can resist a mystery. The mystery deepens significantly six months later, when a friend in the countryside urgently requests Campion?s help. On arrival in Sussex, Campion is presented with a dead body that, in life, most definitely belonged to the late-and-not-much-lamented Pig. So who, exactly, was buried six months earlier? Narrated, for the first and only time, in Campion?s own voice.

Goodreads synopsis:

Albert Campion, is in hospital, the victim of an apparent accident, with no memory of anything except the fact that the fate of the British Empire is somehow cradled in his bandaged hands.

He can?t remember his faithful manservant or his fianc, and most particularly he can?t remember killing a policeman, a crime for which whispering voices outside his hospital room claim he will shortly hang. Escaping in a stolen car, Campion finds odd shreds of memory returning.

His mission, he?s certain, has something to do with the number 15 and also with the town of Bridge, which, he dimly recalls, is run by an ancient, hereditary, and extremely secretive sect.

Goodreads synopsis:

The golden sprig of a rich aristocratic family, Timothy Kinnit is about to marry the girl of his dreams. But when rumors start to circulate about his parentage, the young lady’s father puts the kibosh on the wedding, and shortly thereafter, Timothy becomes the chief suspect in a housebreaking and a suspicious death. When Mr. Campion gets involved, he finds that somebody will go to very ugly lengths to keep Timothy from finding the answers he needs.

Goodreads synopsis:

In this, Ms. Allingham’s last novel, the action revolves around Saltey, for centuries a hidey-hole for all manner of villains. Astonishingly, it is the early 1960s, and Saltey, like many English coastal towns, is being over-run by teenage gangs. But that’s not why Albert Campion – now, really astonishingly, in late middle-age – has persuaded Lugg to take up residence. His interest lies in part with the just-out-of-prison thief who has (in time-honored tradition) gone to ground in Saltey. But his most passionate interest is reserved for the curious, newly revived story of the Saltey Demon.

Goodreads synopsis:

Three desperate men converge in the midst of an annual carnival in New Mexico. Sailor used to be Senator Willis Douglass’ protege. When he met the lawmaker, he was just a poor kid, living on the Chicago streets. Douglass took him in, put him through school, and groomed him to work as a confidential secretary. And as the senator’s dealings became increasingly corrupt, he knew he could count on Sailor to clean up his messes. Willis Douglass isn’t a senator anymore; he left Chicago, Sailor, and a murder rap behind and set out for the sunny streets of Santa Fe. Now, unwilling to take the fall for another man’s crime, Sailor has set out for New Mexico as well, with blackmail and revenge on his mind. But there’s another man on his trail as well―a cop who wants the ex-senator for more than a payoff. In the midst of a city gone mad, bursting with wild crowds for a yearly carnival, the three men will violently converge… The suspenseful tale that inspired one of the most beloved film noirs of all time, Ride the Pink Horse is a tour-de-force that confirms Dorothy B. Hughes’ status as a master of the mid-century crime novel.

Goodreads synopsis:

In a small, artsy New Mexico town, the arrival of a wealthy stranger from back East is enough to get folks talking. Even a few years after Mona Brandon landed in Santa Maria, the rumor mill still churns with tid-bits about her money, her influence, and — when a corpse is discovered in the nearby desert that may or may not be her husband  — her secret and suspicious past.

From the counter at her local jewelry and art shop, Jean Holly has a front row seat for all this gossip and more, after her acquaintance with Pat Abbott, the detective investigating the apparent murder, turns romantic. With his deductive reasoning and her local knowledge combined, they have everything they need to discover whodunnit. But will they be able to put the pieces together and solve the mystery before the killer strikes again?

With characters and a setting inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan and the Taos art colony, The Turquoise Shop is a delightful Golden Age mystery adorned with Southwestern historical detail. It is the first novel in the popular and long-running Pat and Jean Abbott series, which charmed mid-century audiences with over twenty-five installments and which was adapted for multiple radio programs in the 40s and 50s.