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Challenge The Impossible $19.00

We’ve saved the best for last! Follow Dr. Sam Hawthorne through the war years, a time that he called “the beginning of two of the most eventful years of my life.” The final collection of Dr. Sam Hawthorne stories covers 1940-1944 and includes 15 stories of impossible crimes. From the death of a Siamese cat in a locked veterinary clinic to the death of a Nazi spy, Dr. Sam explains the mysteries that confront the town of Northmont, Connecticut. His cases include: an impossible crime where the wife disappears from the attic where she is confined a murder charge against Sheriff Lens on the cusp of his last campaign for office a case where a man claims to have killed a man using invisibility a cottage where suicides take place too frequently, told to a special visitor to Dr. Sam.  While the Dr. Sam stories have come to an end, Crippen & Landru will proudly be presenting Hoch’s Ladies next year, featuring the distaff characters from the master of the short story form. That collection will be followed by collections of both Simon Ark and Alexander Swift.  ...read more

Deal with the Devil and 13 Short Stories $18.00

Deal With the Devil is the first collection of short stories by one of today’s favorite writers of mystery novels and short stories. The stories in Deal With the Devils show how even the most mundane things can lead to a whirl of mystery — a randy husband, a bingo game on a cruise liner, an ugly bridesmaid dress, a husband jogging with a startlingly beautiful trainer (a dangerous situation at the best of times), and Satan ready to take over people’s lives.  Viets is the creator of several popular detectives — reporter Francesca Vierling, Dead-End Jobs worker Helen Hawthorne, Death Investigator Angela Richman, and Mystery Shopper Josie Marcus.  This collection includes two stories in the Dead-End Jobs series and one each about Francesca Vierling and Angela Richman.  Two of the stories received Best Short Story Mystery Awards, the Anthony for “Red Meat” and the Agatha for “Wedding Knife.”  Introduction and prefaces to each story by the author and including a complete Elaine Viets bibliography. ...read more

The Zanzibar Shirt and Other Stories $19.00

Murder in a Familiar Setting Since time began, authors have been told to write what they know. James Holding (1907-1997) took that advice to heart. After his retirement from advertising, Holding began writing full-time. One of his early ghostwriting gigs was continuing the Ellery Queen Jr novels, which had first appeared in the 1940s. The two cousins who wrote as Ellery Queen, Fred Dannay and Manfred Lee, hired Holding to jumpstart the series after a lengthy hiatus. At the same time, Holding decided to write a series of short stories about fictional sleuths King Danforth and Martin Leroy, two collaborative mystery writers (whose character was named Leroy King) on their own around-the-world cruise with their wives. The cases on the high seas are masterpieces of deductions and logic, following the smallest clues to their logical deductions. The stories even included the title structure “The Location Object Mystery” as used in the early Ellery Queen mysteries, such as The Roman Hat Mystery and The Greek Coffin Mystery. Presumably the stories met with the approval of Dannay as the works appeared first in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Holding would continue to write short stories, ultimately publishing over 100 stories in the mystery field. In addition to Leroy King, he wrote about series characters Manuel Andrada, also known as The Photographer, a hired killer and Hal Johnson, the Library Detective. This collection includes all ten stories in the series along with a brief biography of Holding and the most comprehensive bibliography of Holding’s short story works.  ...read more

Sequel to Murder $19.00

Anthony Gilbert, the pseudonym of Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899-1973), is remembered for the creation of Arthur Crook, who unlike aristocratic sleuths such as Lord Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion is earthy and occasionally (as editor John Cooper says in the introduction) outrageously cheeky, with a sensitivity with the down-and-outers who are caught up in crime. Beginning in 1936, Gilbert wrote more than 50 novels featuring Arthur Crook, a London lawyer who spends as much time in pubs as in his office, and who goes to outlandish, and not always legal, lengths to clear his clients. Sequel to Murder includes all the Arthur Crook short cases, as well as a selection of Gilbert's other mystery stories. This is the thirty-ninth volume in Crippen & Landru's Lost Classics series -- previously uncollected detective and mystery stories by great writers of the past. ...read more

My Mother, The Detective: The Complete "Mom" Short Stories Enlarged edition $19.00

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of James Yaffe. His talent and wit will be sorely missed.

More than 20 years ago, we published James Yaffe's classic Armchair Detective stories.  We have now re-published the book and included an additional story, making this "complete" edition even more complete.

Mom never wanted her son Dave to become a policeman. "For all the brains it takes, believe me, you might as well be in business with your uncles." Besides, "All those gangsters and dope fiends and bookies and hatchet murderers and other such goniffs; isn't it possible you could get hurt some day?" Dave and his very superior, Wellesley-educated wife, Shirley, have dinner with Mom in the Bronx every Friday evening. Between the chicken soup and the schnecken, Dave talks about his current cases, and mom's long experience in dealing with scheming butchers, nosey neighbors, and eccentric relatives leads her to a logical solution to the mysteries. ...read more

The Purple Flame and Other Detective Stories $19.00

Frederick Irving Anderson (1877-1947) “has shown perhaps the greatest mastery of the American short detective story . . . in ingenuity, command of plot, and the carefully integrated backgrounds of his work.”  So wrote the great mystery critic and historian, Howard Haycraft, in 1941.   Ellery Queen added that “his style is rich in detail and double-rich in expression.”

Many of Anderson’s stories take place in New York City during the 1920s and the 1930s, and they feature the manhunter Deputy Parr and the “extinct author,” Oliver Armiston, who stopped writing ingenious crime stories because criminals were copying his gimmicks.

The book is edited and introduced by the Anderson expert (and Poe scholar), Benjamin F. Fisher. "His ability to add dimension to his characters and their environments and his carefully modulated diction ('Anderson leavens his fiction with abundant colloquial language') all combined to make Frederick Irving Anderson not only a good detective fiction writer but also an important local color author and a chronicler of the American scene as it existed in the first third of the 20th century." by Mike Tooney   Cloth.  $29.00  ISBN 978-1-936363-15-5  Trade softcover.  $19.00  ISBN 978-1-936363-16-2 ...read more