Wednesday Paperback Cover

Today's cover comes from reader Eric Beetner. Submissions for the Wednesday Paperback Cover are always welcome.

Detnovel.com

William Marling, a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, has a fascinating Web site on detective fiction with articles on famous authors and works of hard boiled fiction. I would spend all day reading this if I didn't have to work. (via.) I'm not sure how I managed to overlook this site, but I'm going to be spending some quality time there this week.

Free Books from Bleak House

I am back from my vacation, and regular posting should resume shortly. As I checked my inbox for the first time in a week, I found a message from Bleak House Books about their holiday promotion, which involves giving away books. That's right. Get a free book. All you pay is shipping and handling. It's difficult to beat that kind of deal. Bleak House has a ton of great titles to choose one, so don't miss out on this deal.

Review of The Spoke

Bitter Lemon Press performs an invaluable service by making foreign language crime fiction available in English. They’ve opened the door for many worthy authors whose work would otherwise be unknown to a large audience of crime fiction readers. Bitter Lemon’s most fascinating find, by far, is Swiss author Friedrich Glauser, author of the Sergeant Studer novels.

Glauser, who wrote in German, was a junkie, a jail inmate, member of the foreign legion and a mental patient. He started writing novels in an asylum and was a prolific letter writer. Unfortunately, there is very little biographical information about him in English, which makes him something of an enigma. His novels, including the latest to be translated by Mike Mitchell, The Spoke (Bitter Lemon Press, 2008), are conventional detective stories up until the point that they’re not. Studer, who is laconic and rational, also depends on dreams to guide him and sees nothing strange about it. It is also true that it is seldom the dead who are the real victims.

As with The Chinaman, the real victims in The Spoke are the living. The novel finds the marriage of Studer’s daughter interrupted by the discovery of a murder at the hotel where the wedding party is staying. Complicating matters is the fact that Studer’s first love is married to the hotel’s consumptive owner. What at first appears to be an open-and-shut case of murder over a woman turns into something more complicated when Studer starts questioning the shady characters hanging around the hotel. Studer’s patient interrogations and his innate skepticism get him ever closer to the truth, and when he finally arrives the crimes surrounding the murders loom larger than the deaths.

Glauser is not to be missed. The Spoke is the final novel in his Sergeant Studer series, and also the last to be translated into English. Start with Thumbprint, the first in the series and go from there. Glauser is an author worth getting to know.

Review of Fifty-to-One

To commemorate the publication of the fiftieth Hard Case Crime title, publisher Charles Ardai has penned a comic what-if novel set fifty years ago about a not-too-ethical paperback pubisher who stirs up some trouble when he publishes a supposedly true account of the robbery of a mafia owned nightclub that was actually penned by a young dancer from South Dakota. Hijinks ensue when it turns out there really was a robbery at the club in question, and the owner is out for blood. To make the novel a bit more fun, Ardai has used the titles of each of Hard Case's fifty titles in chronological order as chapter titles. The result is an entertaining, if overly long, caper. Ardai does a pretty good job in working the book titles into the story, although there are some groaners (the Zero Cool chapter, for instance).

Fifty-to-One is not as good as the novels Ardai has published under his Aleas pseudonym, but it's not meant to be a masterpiece. It's meant to be a love letter to the golden age of paperback novels and a thank you note to the loyal fans of his publishing venture. With cameo appearances by some writers Hard Case aficianados will appreciate, joyful deployment of genre cliches and a color insert of Hard Case covers, this is a book for people who have shelves crammed with paperbacks old and new.

Vacation

I am officially on vacation until sometime around the middle of December. That means a vacation from the blog too. I've got a couple of reviews set to auto post, but I'm gonna be somewhere else thinking about other things for a while. I will return, however.

Wednesday Papberback Cover

I wonder how much he spends on hair gel each month.

An Interview with James Reasoner

Over at The Tainted Archive, there's an interview with James Reasoner. It's primarily about his Westerns, and the format of the layout can make it hard to read at times, but it's still worth reading. (via).

Wednesday Paperback Cover

Another one from Peter Handel.

Pulp on the Web

PBS has an interesting article about Sci-fi pulp magazines and how they're adapting (or failing to adapt) to the Web. It doesn't focus on crime or mystery fiction, but it does point out that Dell, which publishes Asmiov's and Analog Science Fiction also publishes Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazines, and I think that they're pretty much in the same boat in terms of declining circulation and failing to attract new readers (I mean, how many people even know who the hell Ellery Queen was any more? Alfred Hitchock at least has some name recognition.) I know I tend to think of Plots with Guns or Thuglit as the places to go to read new crime short stories. I might pick up a copy of AHMM or EQMM if I happen to see them on a shelf (which isn't often), but it's hardly must read material.