Though members of the Detection Club swore allegiance to fairly clued classical puzzles, even founding members like Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers strayed from strict conformity to the rules. Evans draws on members’ correspondence in an engagingly written and impeccably documented history of the organization showing the gradual erosion of the fair-play concept. Apart from the still-famous names, the contributions of writers like Milward Kennedy and E.R. Punshon to the development of the form are given their due. Writers heretofore names on a page are brought to life as individual personalities. The title refers to an entertaining debate over the membership qualifications of Douglas G. Browne and the elaborate solution to a bathtub murder in his novel What Beckoning Ghost (1947). Illustrations include pictures of members and prospects plus a few dust jacket covers. Everyone interested in the history of the British detective novel should read this.

In the collection of Frederic Dannay’s papers at Columbia University are copies of the Ellery Queen team’s correspondence when Manfred B. Lee was living on the West Coast and they were developing three of their finest novels: Ten Days’ Wonder, Cat of Many Tails, and The Origin of Evil. Edgar-winning playwright Goodrich has done a superb job of editing and annotating the letters, which reveal the painful-to-contemplate combativeness and mutual recrimination of the Queens’ professional relationship. That they could work together for 40 years, creating America’s finest body of classical detective fiction, is nothing short of a miracle. Lee to Dannay in 1948: “You get sick after you open my letters. I get sick before I open yours. The mere sight of your handwriting on the envelope upsets me.” Fortunately, the letters also reflect enough of the cousins’ genuine concern for each other and empathy for their difficult family lives to balance the incredible level of bile, insult, and willful misunderstanding.

In Raymond Benson’s The Black Stiletto, a 1950s rape victim becomes a vengeance-seeking superhero, skintight black costume and all. Just because a book’s plot sounds improbable doesn’t mean it isn’t a terrific read, and this stirring, action-packed book is a prime example of imagination triumphing over logic. At puberty, Judy Talbot develops unusually acute vision and hearing, along with an almost ESP-like ability to sense when someone’s lying. After fleeing from her abusive stepfather, she heads to Manhattan, where she takes boxing and martial arts lessons in order to protect herself in the future. Once fighting fit, she uses her physical prowess to wreak vengeance on the mobsters who murdered her lover, then patrols the mean streets to rescue New Yorkers in distress.

Given such an unlikely setup, this book shouldn’t work, but it does—we follow Judy “Black Stiletto” Talbot’s adventures with a mixture of delight and awe. Benson isn’t just a talented writer, he’s an experienced one, too. The author of several James Bond 007 books knows a thing or two about making extraordinary heroes come alive. Understanding that Judy’s exploits might stretch the limits of credulity, he tells his story through Judy’s journal, which has been discovered years later by her son Martin. As Martin begins to read, we share his disbelief when he initially dismisses his aged mother’s journal as the delusions of an Alzheimer’s patient. When he eventually finds yellowed newspaper clippings that back up Judy’s journal, along with her famous black costume, we rejoice with him. But even if those clippings hadn’t appeared, we’d believe Judy’s tale anyway because Benson has packed her exploits with so much heart that we want them to be true.

We’re in big-time-adventure territory when we hit Ward Larsen’s Fly by Night. This time out (after Fly by Wire) Jammer Davis, a pilot and crash investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, finds himself in hot water in the African nation of Sudan. He’s ostensibly looking into the crash of a cargo plane owned by a Bahamian company whose planes are so substandard it’s referred to as “Fly by Night” airlines. Despite Jammer’s NTSB papers, he’s really there to find out if the Bahamian company has any connection to the local Muslim terrorists, and if so, to determine if the company caused the crash of an expensive US Air Force drone. It’s a dangerous posting, but Jammer, a modern-day Errol Flynn, is up to it. He can fly, he can box, he can scuba dive, and he can shoot very, very straight.

If Jammer has a weakness, it’s his tender heart. When he meets the beauteous Dr. Regina Antonelli, a United Nations doctor working at an isolated desert clinic, he’s swept off his feet. Smitten, he attempts to help her get food and medicine for her patients, but this turns out to be as dangerous as exposing terrorists. The scenes involving the clinic will tear at your heart, for we see fat, government-backed warlords stealing food meant for starving children, and the author uses easily checked data to prove that this is happening right now in real-life Sudan (and other war-torn countries).

Eye-openers aside, Larsen keeps his plot moving by giving us Rafiq Khoura, a shady imam who isn’t the pure-hearted cleric he pretends to be, and Fadi Jibril, an engineer whose brilliance is second only to his religious extremism. Okay, I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for Jammer. His chivalric combination of toughness and tenderness has gained him many women readers such as myself, but Jammer’s intimate knowledge of aircraft and other skills keeps his male readership strong. And giving him a rebellious teenage daughter to deal with while he’s dealing with corrupt governments, warlords and terrorists—well, that was a stroke of brilliance on Larsen’s part. If you’re ever in trouble in the Sudan, you’d want an all-around hero like him by your side.

Morty Guggenmoose’s Speechless: A Life of the Mind University Mystery is a convoluted Canadian mystery, where overeducated academics divide their time between perusing the Greek and Latin classics, and perhaps plotting the murders of competing academics. Protagonist Morty Guggenmoose (yes, I know, he’s also the supposed author of this odd little book), a student at Life of the Mind University, has fallen for a gorgeous fellow student named Sunny Lee. Beside himself with lust and longing, Morty uses an ancient Greek incantation to make her return his affections, but it doesn’t appear to work. Also in trouble is Morty’s conference paper, “Horace: What’s with All the Ablatives?” (Note for non-philologists: an ablative is a grammatical case expressing the relation of separation and source, God help us.) Morty’s woes escalate when an old Greek coin disappears and Professor Elder Nooken, Director of the Pfumpfermeister Museum, gets murdered. Now it’s up to our befuddled hero and his equally befuddled friend, Wilber “Mashie” Micklechuck, to find out whodunit. A parody of sorts (did you notice those names?), Speechless is witty in its scholastic send-ups, and should thus have strong appeal for the wounded veterans of Academia. However, the average reader might want to approach its convoluted sentences and drawn-out Homeric and philological references with caution—or at least not without a big, fat dictionary.

Ellery Queen called Vincent Cornier the author of “one of the great series of modern detective stories.” Of course he said that more than 60 years ago, so you can be forgiven if you didn’t know it. Mike Ashley brings back some the best of Cornier’s stories in The Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth. Hildreth is an agent of the British Secret Service, and he deals with some wonderful problems, such as the one involving an ancient Egyptian curse. I find stories like this irresistible, and while some might find Cornier’s writing style a bit dated, I have no problem at all getting into the spirit of things to read about impossible crimes and incredible events. The first story in the book, “The Stone Ear,” is probably the best known, mainly because the mystery is not resolved until the final word. Ashley provides a comprehensive introduction to Cornier and the stories.

If you’re the kind of person who thinks impossible crimes and locked rooms are too old-fashioned and finds Holmes and Rumpole too civilized, have no fear: New Pulp Press is here with Crime Factory: The First Shift, an anthology of noir stories that are dark, bitter, and filled with criminals and con men, psychos and sinners. The table of contents reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary noir, with writers from all over the world. There’s Ken Bruen from Ireland, Roger Smith from South Africa, Leigh Redhead and Adrian McKinty from Australia. The US is well represented, too, with the likes of Patricia Abbott, Hilary Davidson, and way too many more to name. Editors Keith Rawson, Cameron Ashley, and Jimmy Callaway have put together as wild an anthology as you’re likely to find, and if you want to know what’s shaking the crime field right now, this is a book you need to read.

In keeping with the motif of towns sporting theme-oriented specialty shops, typified by Lorna Barrett in her Booktown Mysteries, Janet Bolin introduces Threadville, Pennsylvania, a crafter’s mecca for all things related to needlework arts. In Dire Threads, Bolin introduces Willow Vanderling, proud proprietor of a new embroidery shop, In Stitches. In the good company of her best friend Haylee, who has also opened a textile crafts boutique, Willow embraces the placid small-town lifestyle far removed from the frenzied pace of Manhattan, but it doesn’t take long for her to discover that peace is illusory.

When Willow resists pressure from Mike Krawbach, the zoning commissioner, to promote his petition to create an ATV trail through Willow’s own property, she makes enemies very quickly. When Mike’s body turns up in her yard, Willow must defend herself against accusations of murder.

Accompanied by Tally-Ho (Tally) and Sally Forth (Sally), quite possibly the cutest puppies in the world, Willow takes matters into her own hands, discovering, in the process, that apparently innocuous neighbors can be vicious, even on the shores of Lake Erie. Bolin weaves a tale that will keep readers guessing. It doesn’t hurt if said readers are also fans of embroidery, the featured craft in the fresh Threadville Mystery Series.