The Return of Theodore Terhune – and Book Giveaway!

I was delighted to go to my lobby and retrieve a pile of packages yesterday, including one big box from Moonstone Press. Inside were five copies of the latest Bruce Graeme books they have reprinted. And now it's time for me to announce a secret I’ve (almost) kept to myself for over a year. Seven of the eight Theodore Terhune mystery novels are slated for reprinting and all of them will be released at scattered months throughout 2021! Moonstone is releasing them in chronological order so you can read the books as they were first published back in the 1940s and 1950s. The first two pictured here have been out since last month and are available in both digital and paperback versions.  Some good news for US readers who prefer physical printed books is that Amazon in the US can do a POD of the book so you don't have to wait for one to be shipped from the UK.

Another bonus: the Terhune series consist entirely of bibliomysteries, a subgenre of detective novels about books and book collecting. Each mystery novel is chockful of intriguing details and lore touching on all aspects of bibliomania including, in one later book, the arcane world of book auctions.

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I reviewed Seven Clues in Search of a Crime, the first of the Theodore Terhune books, two years ago. Several comments on that post lamented that the book was impossible to find due to its scarcity and were hoping for a reprint. Voila! Sometimes your wishes come true, my friends. You just need a little patience.

I have been hired to write introductions to all of the books so you’ll get some interesting detective fiction history on how each book fits into the history of the development of the genre, as gaining insight to Graeme’s favorite themes and genre conventions. The publisher of Moonstone Press put me in touch with Graeme’s granddaughter and I was able to get some interesting anecdotes about her memories of him and bits of her emails to me have been included in the biographical section of the intro that appears in House with the Crooked Walls. He was quite a character!

To celebrate this exciting news of more Bruce Graeme books now readily available to the eager devotees of Golden Age of Detective Fiction I’m offering a copy of each of the two newly released books, Seven Clues in Search of a Crime and the equally impossible to find title House with Crooked Walls, to one lucky reader of this blog post.

RULES:

1. Open only to those who live in USA, Canada or UK. (If you live in the EU or somewhere on the Asian continent I hope you have a friend who will accept the package for you in one of the three eligible countries.)
2. Leave a comment below and tell me the title of your favorite bibliomystery.
3. After one week I will assign entries a number then randomly select one of those numbers through an entirely unorthodox but failproof method that has nothing to do with the internet.
4. Winners will be announced here on March 24.

Good luck to all those who enter!

  *** CONTEST NOW OVER ***

Write? Of Course Write!

...or, The Mystery of the Vanishing Posts Explained in Full

Here's a brief list of my proud accomplishments outside of the blog in 2015.  It was the busiest year for research and writing projects and I learned a valuable life lesson in saying "Sure! I'd love to be a part of that!" way too often. Life has a way of interfering with one's plans and my schedule was thrown off course in a drastic way.

With the declining health of my mother and her eventual death I was overwhelmed with things I've never had to face before. I not only had no more time to write on the blog I had to put away all writing for a period of about three months as the family tended to the business of the estate. As Christmas time rolled around faster than ever (it seemed) I found myself catching up on deadlines and got in my final drafts, some just in the nick of time. Here's what is out and what is coming:

Blondes Are My Trouble by Douglas Sanderson (Véhicule Press, 2015)
Foreword by J.F. Norris

One of the best private eye novels set in Canada. My foreword discusses the unlikely feminist angle in a private eye novel which tend to be hypermasculine in their worldview. The female characters, women's viewpoints and their opinions, even attention to women's clothing are very important in this plot which is centered on a prostitution ring.

-- available for purchase now

 

Beat Girls, Love Tribes and Real Cool Cats (Verse Chorus Press, 2016)
Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture 1950-1980

Includes my essay on A Sad Song Singing (1963) by Thomas Dewey and a discussion of the folk music scene in New York as depicted in that novel

-- planned for a May 2016 release


As Yet Untitled Anthology edited by Curt Evans (McFarland)

This book is a collection of reviews, essays and biographies on gay mystery writers and how LGTB issues are treated in Golden Age detective fiction. The nineteen contributors cover books written between 1890 and 1969, the date of the Stonewall Riots and the beginning of the "gay revolution".

--- publication slated for late 2016 or early 2017

For the untitled book, still being compiled and edited, I have contributed three essays on three different writers whose work spans a fifty year period, from 1912 to 1969.

Beverley Nichols (circa 1930s) photo by Cecil Beaton
©National Portrait Gallery, London

The Beverley Nichols piece was the most fun to write and research.  I may write a bit more about Nichols and his Mr. Green series for the blog come mid-year. The books are wonderful examples of the British detective novel of the late 1950s and tend to focus on music, theater and Nichols' first love -- horticulture and gardening. It was interesting to learn that Nichols had an undeniable respect for the traditions of the Golden Age formulae and plot mechanics.

I hope this year to be more regular with posts. I have planned a new format for book reviews on this blog that will make it quicker for me to churn out reviews. Most likely I'll be spending more time on new books in an effort to get more freelancing paid work and I plan on looking at more reprints of vintage writers' work now that we are in a Renaissance of Golden Age detective fiction reprint publishing.

Onward and upward!

"Oh, Oh, We're Halfway There!" - Updates and News

Not quite "Livin' on a Prayer" yet but I may be offering my prayers up to the book gods come this summer as more and more deadlines approach. Very, very busy this year.

I've been holding back discussing some of the projects I've been working on when not dishing out reviews for this blog. There have been hints dropped here and there, but now I'm ready to make at least one announcement. One of my essays will be included in a soon to be released study of popular fiction. I'm very excited since this will be the first non-fiction book my writing has ever been published in. I've had several forewords and introductions appear in small press reprints of forgotten books as many of you know, but this is so very different. First, because the editors approached me to be included and second because it has led to contributing to a second book by the same editorial team.

Beat Girls, Love Tribes and Real Cool Cats.: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 – 1980 is published by Verse Chorus Press, the fine people who re-introduced Australian mystery writer June Wright to the crime fiction readers of the world. It's been edited and compiled by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntrye, writers and critics both based in Melbourne, Australia.  Beat Girls... is a fascinating compilation of essays and reviews focusing on the beat culture, juvenile delinquents, motorcycle gangs, hippies, folkies and all sorts of other youth culture as depicted in thirty years' worth of US, UK and Australian popular fiction. I've read several of the essays prior to the book going to print. If you think I know a lot about obscure mysteries and supernatural fiction you will be greatly impressed by the breadth of knowledge shown in the work of myriad contributors. They've dug up some amazing books and writers I've never heard of.  I only wish I had the time and money to buy copies and read several of the books that are discussed in Beat Girls... The book will be officially released (if all goes to the schedule) in November 2015.  More on the book can be found at Andrew Nette's website and blog, Pulp Curry.

My short piece is in the section on music and discusses A Sad Song Singing by Thomas Dewey. The piece first appeared here on Pretty Sinister Books and was slightly revised for inclusion in Beat Girls, Love Tribes and Real Cool Cats.

My research on transgressive fiction of the 1960s and 1970s continues as does my reading and research on the depiction of LGBT characters in mystery fiction from the 1920s through the 1960s.  All this reading is for several essays for two other projects that I will talk about in detail at a later date.  Two reviews -- The Fetish Murders and Body Charge -- were posted on my blog previously this year and both will be part of a much longer essay to appear in another book to be published by Verse Chorus Press sometime in 2016.

And here is the official update on the two Vintage Mystery Reading Challenges I've been working on. At nearly the six month mark for this year I think I'm pretty much on target with more than half the Golden Age card filled and just shy of the 50% mark on the Silver Age card. I'm confident I'll complete both cards well before December 31.

Total: 24 books read out of a planned 36

Total: A Lucky 13 books and almost halfway there.

Most of the marked above books I've reviewed on the blog. I still have about three reviews to write and post. They're a-comin'. Some absolutely will not be reviewed on this blog. Books like The Butterscotch Prince, a wild murder mystery drenched in sweaty sex scenes and dealing with the 1970s gay fetish underworld in lower Manhattan, or The Gay Haunt by Victor Banis really are not appropriate for the regular visitors who read my posts. Anyone interested in learning more about those titles and topics will just have to wait until I write again about my still-in-progresss book projects.