Anna Katharine Green has long been recognized as a significant figure in the early development of detective fiction, but until recently few but historical specialists have actually ventured to read her work. Helping to change that is a new reprint edition of her 1878 debut The Leavenworth Case (Penguin Classics, $16), not only an important milestone but a highly readable and enjoyable novel. In his substantial introduction, Michael Sims credits Green not only with great plotting skill but with a mastery of fast pace and effective dialogue, noting, "Some critics disparage her characters' occasional florid speeches, but if outbreaks of Victorian emotion were fatal, all of Dickens's characters would have expired long ago." In another complimentary comparison, Anthony Boucher wrote in response to charges that Green's World War I-era character Violet Strange was dated, "she is—exactly as dated, say, as Edith Wharton's stories of New York." Those Strange short stories and Green's later novels (the last of them published in 1923) deserve to reach a larger audience as well. A 1929 interview with Green, then 83, is one of many remarkable inclusions in Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle & The Bookman: Pastiches, Parodies, Letters, Columns and Commentary from America's "Magazine of Literature and Life" (1895-1933) (Gasogene, $29.95), edited by S.E. Dahlinger and Leslie S. Klinger.
No one has made Anna Katharine Green into a fictional detective, but given trends in the current market, it's only a matter of time. Dashiell Hammett has often been so employed, most recently in Ace Atkins's 2009 novel Devil's Garden (Berkley, $15), which adds a historical afterword in its trade paperback reprint. Atkins spins a clever and well-written fiction from Hammett's involvement as a Pinkerton operative working on the case of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, the silent film comic tried in San Francisco for manslaughter in the death of Virginia Rappe during a wild party at the St. Francis Hotel in 1921. The characterizations of both central figures are excellently done. Hammett's relationship with his wife Jose is imagined especially deftly. Though Hammett wasn't made for monogamy, some of their dialogue suggests Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man. Also depicted are William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies.
While many current books deal with the past, two new titles extrapolate the near future. A police procedural and a political thriller give contrasting views of what's in store for Great Britain only a few years down the line.
**** Mat Coward: Acts of Destruction, Alia Mondo, £10. Food is scarce, conservation, recycling, and gardening compulsory, public practice of religion illegal. London police investigate a variety of cases (a vanished child, a murdered teacher, garden thefts, street corner preaching) that both intrigue the reader and illustrate aspects of a society presented as neither utopia nor dystopia, but with elements of both. With its points about contemporary problems and possible future solutions, the novel is both dead serious and hilariously funny. (See for instance the visit to the Potato Research Council, beginning on page 55.) The book is available from the author-publisher only in pounds sterling. Why review a book that's so hard to get hold of? Because it's by one of the most original and gifted writers in contemporary crime fiction. For more info, try matcoward.com or maybe amazon.uk.
*** Henry Porter: The Bell Ringers, Atlantic Monthly, $24. At an unspecified date after the 2012 London Olympics, Britons face continued erosion of their privacy by a government able and determined to monitor every move they make, using a supposed terrorist threat to the water supply as an excuse. In a highly readable, cleverly constructed cautionary tale, lawyer Kate Lockhart inherits nothing but trouble from disgraced former intelligence official David Eyam, whose death in a Columbia bomb explosion is documented on video tape.
*** Barbara Allan: Antiques Bizarre, Kensington, $22. Small-town mother/ daughter antique sellers and amateur sleuths Vivian and Brandy Borne solicit the last Fabergé egg from a wealthy resident of Serenity for auction at a church bazaar. Murder follows. In the fourth novel in this tongue-in-cheek cozy series by the team of Barbara and Max Allan Collins, Brandy again tells the story, allowing her bipolar mother one chapter of her own. The result is funny and intricately plotted.
*** Anne Perry: The Sheen on the Silk, Ballantine, $27. Victorian specialist Perry shifts her historical focus back to the 13th-century Ottoman Empire, where physician Anna Zarides comes to Constantinople disguised as a eunuch hoping to clear her brother of murder. As the story shifts from Byzantium to Venice to Rome and the Vatican (some of whose emissaries should be accumulating the medieval equivalent of frequent flyer miles), the political, religious, and social aspects of the time are well explored, and the prose is characteristically fine. But the longwinded tale is undistinguished purely as a mystery.
** Joanne Dobson: Death Without Tenure, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. English professor Karen Pelletier, up for tenure at her New England college, is warned that in the name of diversity she may be passed over in favor of Native American Joe Lone Wolf, aloof with colleagues but beloved by students. The academic background is well done, the prose and dialogue generally good, the story enthralling enough. The problem is that some elements presented seriously—extreme political correctness, absurd challenges to traditional curriculum, Lone Wolf's blatant lack of qualifications, the offensive behavior of the main cop—are depicted in too exaggerated a fashion for any treatment but comedy or satire.
** Erica Spindler: Blood Vines, St. Martin's, $24.99. This romantic suspense/police procedural hybrid starts well: the mummified body of an infant is found on the grounds of a Sonoma County vineyard, and San Francisco graduate student Alexandra Clarkson is plagued by nightmares, worry over her mentally ill mother, and unanswered questions about her past. When the two plots join, matters hum along nicely until falling into a pit of clichés both long-established (excessively foreseeable murder victims) and more recently developed (repressed memory). Both Alex and main cop Daniel Reed have convenient lapses into stupidity to advance the action. (The unabridged audiobook edition [Macmillan Audio, $39.99] is expertly read by Orlagh Cassidy.)
Surinam Turtle Press, the subsidiary of Ramble House edited by Richard A. Lupoff, offers a reprint of Mack Reynolds's 1951 first novel The Case of the Little Green Men ($18 trade paper, $32 hardcover), probably the earliest to explore the comic possibilities of murder at a science-fiction convention. Added features include an introduction by Emil Reynolds, the author's son, and a most interesting biographical afterword by Earl Kemp.
Only about a third, including Bram Stoker's title story, of the 22 stories in Dracula's Guest and Other Victorian Vampire Stories (Walker, $17), edited by Michael Sims, duplicate those in Otto Penzler's massive anthology The Vampire Archives (Vintage/Black Lizard), and Sims also offers considerable editorial content. Thus, blood-drinker buffs will surely want both books.