I’m delighted by how many classic crime novels are being reissued these days. Here are a few recent favorites, which span over a century of excellent storytelling.
Nothing but Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging
by Mary Fortune
“I have been told by some that I tell horrible stories, and by others that I am not sensational enough; and I have personally come to the conclusion that I shall tell just such stories as I please.” So wrote Fortune (1833-1911) about her crime stories, numbering in the hundreds and highlighted in the splendid collection NOTHING BUT MURDERS AND BLOODSHED AND HANGING (Verse Chorus Press, 310 pp., paperback, $19.95), edited by the Australian scholars Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown.
Fortune, arguably the first woman to write a detective fiction series, did not shy away from hardscrabble descriptions of Australia — particularly Melbourne — replete with violent and petty crime. She could also be very arch and funny. This collection cements her place as one of the genre’s earliest, and finest, detective story writers.
Before the Fact
by Francis Iles
Francis Iles (1893-1971) was one of the English crime writer Anthony Berkeley Cox’s many pen names. Praise is rightly heaped on Iles’s debut, “Malice Aforethought,” the 1931 novel that begins with the famous line “It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Doctor Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter.” But I’m glad to see a new edition of his second novel, BEFORE THE FACT (British Library Crime Classics, 340 pp., paperback, $15.99), a dread-soaked narrative about a young woman named Lina Aysgarth who gradually realizes that her husband has murder on his mind — and that she is his intended victim.
Iles offers a master class in ratcheting up suspense as Lina, consumed with terror, descends into madness. It’s no wonder that Alfred Hitchcock adapted the novel as “Suspicion,” though even he couldn’t quite match Iles’s ability to ensnare the audience in Lina’s torturous web.
To Catch a Thief
by David Dodge
Speaking of Hitchcock, another one of the many books he adapted into film has rightfully resurfaced in print. TO CATCH A THIEF (Library of Congress Crime Classics, 240 pp., paperback, $15.99), originally published in 1952, was supposed to be, in Dodge’s words, “another potboiler that just might go as far as the paperback reprints.”
Nicknamed “Le Chat” by the French newspapers, the jewel thief John Robie executed a stunning series of robberies on the French Riviera. Now retired, tending his garden and olive trees in a small villa in the south of France, he is summarily — and wrongly — accused of a new series of thefts targeting rich, careless tourists on the glittering Côte d’Azur (“60 miles of jewels,” he thinks wistfully).
As Dodge hikes up the tension with every new theft, Robie, a thief at heart, is torn between worry for his own future and admiration for whoever is pulling off the new heists: “He had stolen nothing in 12 years, had no intention ever to steal again, and yet retained a thief’s distrust of those who were not thieves themselves.”
It was a blast to read the source material for one of Hitchcock’s more effervescent films, and Dodge’s familiarity with southern France adds a gloss of glamour to the whole affair.
Tokyo Express
by Seicho Matsumoto
Matsumoto (1909-92) wrote a great many detective novels, but his masterpiece, first published in Japan in 1958, is TOKYO EXPRESS (Modern Library, 155 pp., paperback, $18), newly translated by Jesse Kirkwood. It stands out thanks to the “elegant spareness of the prose,” as Amor Towles writes in his introduction, but also because of the ingenuity of the tightly coiled plot.
A laborer walking to his factory job early one morning discovers the bodies of a man and woman on the beach — an apparent double “love suicide.” Or is it? Thanks to the meticulous, almost pointillist work of the old-school detective Jutaro Torigai and a young colleague, Kiichi Mihara, the crime is solved with the help of a railway schedule.
To say more would spoil the pleasure of reading this, so I shan’t, but this novel floored me, and I expect it will floor other new readers, too.
The Aud Torvingen trilogy
by Nicola Griffith
This cool, beautiful, knife-sharp trilogy — first published between 1998 and 2007 — is finally back in circulation. STAY (Picador, 306 pp., paperback, $20) and THE BLUE PLACE (Picador, 320 pp., paperback, $20) are less about crime, and more about Aud herself, a six-foot blond Norwegian American private investigator confident of her capacity for violence and retribution, and less sure about her ability to truly love. ALWAYS (Picador, 518 pp., paperback, $20) is a lengthier (and less successful) narrative, but still filled with unforgettable scenes, such as the ones where Aud teaches self-defense to a group of women.
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