John Dickson Carr on Kindle and iBooks

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), among the crime novelists I grew up reading, is the best of the best. US-born but with close ties to the UK, Carr is one of the stars of the Golden Age of crime fiction.

He was the grand master of the 'locked room' mystery (his The Hollow Man [1935] defines the entire sub-genre), author of some 80 books of surprisingly uniform quality, cerebral even when he made the reader laugh (his most-used pseudonym was wrongly suspected of belonging to P. G. Wodehouse), a master of both 'contemporary' and historical mystery fiction. (Incidentally, the first chapter of his first 'historical', The Bride of Newgate, measures up very well to the best of Dumas, and all of Carr's 'Victorian melodramas' are good, too.) Carr even experimented (on rare occasions, but successfully) with such unexpected themes as time travel and witchcraft. His place in my personal list of 26 favorite authors is very secure.

And now you can read him in ebook format. Thanks to the Langtail Press, six of Carr's classic novels are now available--all 'contemporaries', most featuring one or the other of his star detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell (He Who Whispers, The Problem of the Green Capsule) or Sir Henry Merrivale (The Plague Court Murders, And So to Murder, She Died a Lady), with one spectacular non-series novel, The Burning Court, thrown into the mix. (I've provided links to Kindle editions, but all six are also available on iBooks, and Carr is 'priced to sell' in both formats.)

And just in case you're not a fan of locked-room puzzles... neither am I: I just like John Dickson Carr.

Give him a try.

Ellery Queen on Kindle

When I was growing up, Ellery Queen was one of my five favorite crime novelists. (The others were John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout.) I read my first several Queen novels in Pocket Books priced at 25 cents, and by the time I'd made my way through the canon I was paying well over a dollar apiece for the 1970s Signet editions of Queen with the mod cover photos. If you had told me then that Ellery Queen would ever be virtually out of print, I would have found it inconceivable. And yet.... There are many reasons for publishers' neglect of Queen. Suffice it to say that all of that seems to changing with this morning's release for Kindle of three mysteries from Queen's heyday. Halfway House is a good place to start, coming as it does immediately after the nine novels (the earliest is The Roman Hat Mystery) with parallel nationality-plus-noun titles: Halfway House can be seen as marking Queen's turn from the series's overly cerebral beginnings to the more complex psychological content that culminates in the Wrightsville novels (starting with the superb Calamity Town). I haven't read Halfway House in about 50 years, but it was a favorite and I'm returning to it with great eagerness; its successor, The Door Between, I did reread recently and found to be every bit as good as I had remembered it. For today's Kindle releases (and their print counterparts) we're indebted to Agatha Christie's great-grandson James Prichard and his latest project, The Langtail Press. More to come.