Recently, two publishers decided to reissue mystery classics from the "Golden Age" of crime writing.
Penzler Publishers created its imprint, American Mystery Classics, to re-release classic American mystery and detective fiction in hardcover and paperback. Ellery Queen, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Craig Rice will be featured.
Poisoned Pen Press will also be publishing mystery classics, with a focus on titles originally published across the pond. Their focus will be on books from the British Crime Classic series and the British Library Spy Classics series.
Robert Rosenwald, President at Poisoned Pen Press, shares, "The British Library Crime and Spy Classics series provides important historical context for mystery enthusiasts. These titles are written by authors who were pioneers in crime fiction..." Source.
Below are just a few of the American Mystery Classics and British Crime Classics the Library titles has available for mystery devotees.
The offices of foreign literature publisher and renowned stamp collector Donald Kirk are often host to strange activities, but the most recent occurrence--the murder of an unknown caller, found dead in an empty waiting room--is unlike any that has come before. Nobody, it seems, entered or exited the room, and yet the crime scene clearly has been manipulated, leaving everything in the room turned backwards and upside down. Stuck through the back of the corpse's shirt are two long spears--and a tangerine is missing from the fruit bowl. Enter amateur sleuth Ellery Queen, who arrives just in time to witness the discovery of the body, only to be immediately drawn into a complex case in which no clue is too minor or too glaring to warrant careful consideration.
Unoccupied and unsupervised while mother is working, the children of widowed crime writer Marion Carstairs find diversion wherever they can. So when the kids hear gunshots at the house next door, they jump at the chance to launch their own amateur investigation--and after all, why shouldn't they? They know everything the cops do about crime scenes, having read about them in mother's novels. They know what her literary detectives would do in such a situation, how they would interpret the clues and handle witnesses. Plus, if the children solve the puzzle before the cops, it will do wonders for the sales of mother's novels. But this crime scene isn't a game at all; the murder is real, and when its details prove more twisted than anything in mother's fiction, they'll have to enlist Marion's help to sort them out. Or is that just part of their plan to hook her up with the lead detective on the case?