Claire Donally’s The Big Kitty is a fine debut. Meet series feline Shadow, green-eyed, gray-striped and larger than life, if you believe the cover. Depending upon whose perspective you credit, Shadow either acquires, or is acquired by, Sunny Coolidge, who, in order to assist her ailing father, has returned to her small-town home in Maine from her New York City life as a successful journalist. Underemployed and underworked, Sunny can’t resist investigating the sudden death of Ada Spruance, the local cat lady, who has made enemies of other animal owners whose pets have tangled with, or been devoured by, Ada’s cats. Ada’s death is particularly suspicious because her body was found at the bottom of stairs that she refused to use. Moreover, she had just claimed to be the winner of a large lottery jackpot (the other “big kitty” in the book), if only she could locate the misplaced ticket. Sunny joins forces with Will Price, the hunky local constable, and Shadow, who true to name, turns up everywhere and sees everything.

The Big Kitty moves nimbly from Shadow’s perspective to Sunny’s and back again. Donally does cat especially well, I must say, and I’m looking forward to getting to know both Shadow and Sunny much better in the future.

Fierce, beautiful, startling, Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary novels explore the mysteries of creative brilliance

In Greek Mythology, Cassandra was the prophetess unheeded, a woman both gifted and cursed by her foresight of death and destruction (the fall of Troy, the slaying of Agamemnon) and scorned by an audience of mockers who refused to believe her dark visions.

Cassandra Neary, the could’ve-been-somebody photographer in Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss and Available Dark, possesses a special sight as well. As a youth, she experienced visions no one else shared: a striated eye looming in the sky, for example, and a man with green-flecked eyes touching her forehead in a dream, leaving a blinding flash on the very morning she received a camera as a birthday present. As a photographer years later, especially during the heyday of New York’s punk scene, she shot “whatever was going on, speed, smack, sex, broken teeth, broken bottles, zip knives” before moving on to even bleaker subjects: “Pigeons flattened upon the curb; a corpse washed up on the shore of the East River, flesh like soft gray flannel folded into the mud; a stripper at a Broadway club sleeping between acts, her exposed breast like a red balloon where the silicone had leaked beneath the skin.” Her own single work of photography was the collection Dead Girls, which included self-portraits recreating macabre tableaux from famous paintings.

Cass’ shot at real fame has long since passed her by, but the cult status of Dead Girls—a collector’s item 30 years after its publication—sparks Cass’ noirish journeys in both Generation Loss and Available Dark, travels that take her into even darker corners of the craft of photography, and not only into some of the world’s colder climes but also into ravaged psychological terrains, both her own and others.

In Generation Loss, Cass is summoned to Maine to interview one of her idols, reclusive photographer Aphrodite Kamestos, a supposed admirer of Dead Girls. Aphrodite’s own photography books had been a major influence on Cass—among them Mors, “a catalog of places where terrible things had happened. Suicide, a murder, sexual torture”—but Cass quickly finds herself an unwelcome guest in the midst of a very tight community, one stung by a string of recent disappearances among the region’s youth. Both a suspect and then an unwitting investigator, Cass stumbles into various layers of trouble that connect the past with the present, including a bristling romance with a man with a green-flecked eye (echoing that dream from her youth) and a budding obsession with a series of Polaroids that “pumped out damage” and reeked like “someone had dumped rotting fish on top of a dead skunk.”

At the start of Available Dark, back in New York after the desperate end of her trip to Maine, Cass receives an unexpected commission: travel to Finland to consult on a series of photographs of corpses whose killings were inspired by the Yuleboys of Icelandic folklore—figures with names like Door Slammer, Spoon Licker, and Meat Hook. Cass finds the images “unspeakably lovely,” but scarcely has she completed her consultation than a fresh series of murders echo those photos—drawing her once more into trouble. And a side trip to visit an old lover in Iceland reveals those photographs’ complex connections to other artistic pursuits: specifically, black metal music, echoing—literally—with its own agonized cries.

“Now made in the USA: Nordic crime fiction,” declared the New York Post in its review of Available Dark, and readers might well be forgiven for wondering if the immense popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction impelled Hand to send her anti-heroine in that geographical direction, especially since Cass herself has frequently been likened to Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. It’s a comparison that’s easy to understand: two intelligent, relentlessly edgy, frequently amoral women; androgynous but physically striking (Cass towers more than six feet tall); each of them traumatized by brutal sexual assaults earlier in their lives and, as a result, now unafraid to lash out in physical violence of their own. Like Lisbeth, Cass bears a tattoo as well: “Too Tough to Die” emblazoned on the scar tissue on her pelvis, a souvenir of her rape. “Scary Neary” is the nickname she earned during her punk days, and she describes herself as “what your mother dreams about in the middle of the night when you don’t come home.” Even in the novels’ present, she fuels her days with Jack Daniels and any of a wide variety of drugs.

But despite similarities, Cass stands clearly as an unforgettable character in her own right (and it’s important to point out that Generation Loss debuted a year before the English translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). And Hand’s concerns are certainly her own as well. Each book explores the passions and perils of artistic endeavor, for example, and Hand writes with equally compelling authority not only about photography and music (her descriptions of individual photographs are among the many highpoints of each book) but about the creative impulse, the compulsions behind those works. Each book also charts the dangerous influences of old religions, legends, and rituals on modern consciousness. Generation Loss features the troubled history of a hippie commune that one participant described as “less Summer of Love than…Lord of the Flies,” with rustic animal masks from those days cropping up in unlikely places. In Available Dark, Nordic legends are revived to uncomfortable ends. And the bitter landscapes against which those artistic and religious obsessions are catalogued—coastal Maine, Helsinki, and Reykjavík—offer vivid backdrops to the equally chilling existential journeys that Cass herself takes—into her past, into herself—alongside the cases she’s found herself tasked with solving.

Reflecting on her own photography, Cass claims to see “where the ripped edges of the world begin to peel away and something else shows through”—a description that echoes once more her mythic namesake. That description might easily apply to Hand herself too, whose exquisite prose, with its crisp details and frequently startling imagery, enriches these relentless inquiries into dark subject matters and reveals with grace and unflinching precision both the damage and the resilience of her characters. Already a veteran of the science fiction and fantasy genres, Hand has quickly established herself as a master in the mystery field as well, and Generation Loss and Available Dark have the feel of instant classics—must-haves for the bookshelf and (it doesn’t take a visionary to predict this) a firm foundation for a promising series ahead.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #124.

Hardboiled boxing stories with criminous elements seem to be making something of a comeback, and Gary Lovisi has edited a slam-bang anthology called Battling Boxing Stories: Thrilling Tales of Pugilistic Puissance.

Wayne Dundee opens the volume with a combination called “Quick Hands.” It’s a western boxing story, good stuff about a tough guy who travels to mining camps with a medicine show and takes on the best men the camps can throw at him. Not for fun, you understand. There’s money involved, and where there’s money, things can get complicated.

Lovisi’s own story is “Boxing, Babes, and Bullets.” That ought to be enough to tempt you right there, but in case you need more, it’s about a guy who’s back from WWII, back in the ring, and bucking the mob. This one’s fast and tough. “A Bullet for a Boxer” by Arlette Lees has a terrific opening sentence: “As I walked across the street between the pawn shop and the Rescue Mission, a bullet slammed into my head and dropped me to my knees.” Things don’t let up after that.

All in all, a dandy collection for everybody who appreciates the sweet science, and also for those who like good fiction with a setting that’s a little different from the usual.

First published in Great Britain by Rupert Books in 1999, Cox’s memoir offers an insider’s view of the Granada Television series, which between 1984 and 1994 introduced one of the best Sherlock Holmes impersonators. Writing, design, directorial, and main cast credits are given for each episode, followed by several pages of commentary, not tedious and unnecessary plot synopses but frank discussions of the problems presented, decisions made, what worked and what didn’t.

Cox is almost always laudatory of his coworkers, but his candor about dubious decisions and what he would change in retrospect erase any suspicion of puffery. Jeremy Brett is shown as kind, generous, and totally professional in his approach to his craft despite his personal troubles, including hospitalization for bipolar disorder. A genuine student of the original stories, he would carefully compare them with their adaptations and he sometimes disputed changes the writers had made. His hope to do all the stories was prevented by his own declining health, along with the difficulties presented by some of the stories, whether of rights, expense, or adaptability.

One of Cox’s most intriguing subjects, albeit non-criminous in the conventional sense, is the commercialization and consequent erosion in quality of British TV. The Broadcasting Act of 1990 brought about “the British television industry we enjoy today, in which ratings and cost-efficiency are all-important and programme decisions are taken by schedulers and accountants.” Speaking of the latter group, after noting complaints about budget items like travel and lodging expenses that do not “show on the screen,” Cox notes, “Neither, of course, does the cost of accountancy.”

Available through Gasogene Books.

Among these 16 essays from The Atlantic, The Weekly Standard, and other periodicals is a substantial piece on religious subjects in mystery fiction, “God and the Detectives.” Among the authors discussed are Charles Merrill Smith, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Melville Davisson Post, G.K. Chesterton, and Margery Allingham.

Many other writers are briefly touched on, bespeaking a wide knowledge of the genre and a hoard of forthright, sometimes contrarian opinions. Other topics range widely: Dickens, Tom Wolfe, T.S. Eliot, P.G. Wodehouse; music, science, memoirists, goth culture. Bottum is consistently stimulating and entertaining.

This is not a step-by-step guide but rather a reference source, in which each of eighty-plus contributors gives advice on a specific step in the mystery-writing process (e.g. research, plot development, characters, point of view, dialogue, background, revision, series management), followed by an exercise for the fledgling writer to address the issue.

Some of the contributors are quite well-known (Louise Penny, John Lutz, Simon Brett, Hallie Ephron, Katherine Hall Page, Rhys Bowen, Bill Crider, and others), and all have solid professional credentials. Most are interesting, at least some potentially useful to the reader willing to follow instructions.

Few academic mystery scholars are as readable and learned and surely none is as prolific as Panek, whose latest topic is the 19th-Century development of the detective story. Some pre-history (William Godwin, Vidocq, Bulwer-Lytton and other writers of “Newgate novels”) is followed by solid material on Poe, Dickens, Collins, and other usual suspects.

Plucked from obscurity are lesser known figures who flourished in newspapers and magazines at a time trans-Atlantic plagiarism was rampant. Many of the early stories are quoted, including a passage from Andrew Forrester’s “The Unknown Weapon,” a story in The Female Detective (1864) that foreshadows the close analysis of the Golden Age of Detection. With more and more early material coming to light thanks to the Internet and ebook publishers, Panek states this study is “only a first step” with “a great deal of material yet to be collected and discussed.” Until the full history is written, this book will be indispensable to serious scholars of early mystery fiction history.