armchairreviewer

Mystery Fiction to Look Out For in 2017

Having a passing interest in reading and crime fiction in particular I’m often looking ahead to what will be coming out soon. Amazon has definitely been very helpful in this and it is from this website that I have based the dates in this post. So I thought I would share with you some of crime fiction I am looking forward to reading next year.

Ian Sansom’s Essex Poison (January 2017, 4th Estate)

This will be the fourth book in the County Guide series.

There also going be Detective Club reprints by Harper Collins….

Anthony Berkeley’s The Wychford Poisoning Case (February 2017)

Arthur B Reeve’s The Adventuress (March 2017)

A. V. Morris’ The Lyttleton Case (May 2017)

Vernon Loder’s The Vase Mystery (November 2017)

The British Library’s wonderful Crime Classics series also has a good selection of books coming out….

Anthony Rolls’ Scar Weather (April 2017)

Anthony Rolls’ Family Matters (May 2017)

Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room and Impossible Crimes (June 2017)

Lois-Austen-Leigh’s The Incredible Crime (July 2017)

Continental Crimes (August 2017)

The next book in L. C. Tyler’s Elsie and Ethelred series will also be coming out in June, with the title The Herring in the Smoke, published by Allison and Busby.

After quite a long wait the 11th book in Boris Akunin’s Erast Fandorin series is being translated and published into English by Orion books, so I am really excited for this. It will be coming out in October I think with the title All the World’s A Stage.

Sherlock Holmes may also be interested to hear that Palgrave Macmillan are publishing Sherlock Holmes in Context (March 2017) as part of their Crime Files series.

The Dean Street Press at the start of the year will also be reprinting E R Punshon’s final 10 Bobby Owen mysteries in January, meaning all 35 of the series will have been reprinted. The titles for the final 10 are: So Many Doors, Everybody Always Tells, The Secret Search, The Golden Dagger, The Attending Truth, Strange Ending, Brought to the Light, Dark is the Clue, Triple Quest and Six Were Present. These reprints include exclusive short stories, a new introduction by Curtis Evans and in Six Were Present there is a never been published before radio play that Punshon did for the BBC.

bobby-owen-books

In February they are also publishing the obscure and rather forgotten, Elizabeth Gill, a golden age author who wrote 3 mysteries featuring Benvenuto Brown, an artist/detective. I have been very fortunate in securing the covers for these three mysteries (The Crime Coast (USA, known as Strange Holiday in the UK), What Dread Hand and Crime De Luxe), as well as getting an early peek at The Crime Coast, which I will hopefully be reviewing on the blog soon.

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So hopefully this has given you some ideas for your TBB (to be bought) list and let me know of other mystery books you are looking forward to reading in 2017. Read a rumour online that the next Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Jill Paton Walsh is meant to be coming out next year as well but not been able to confirm this.

20 comments

  2. The two BL reprints I’m looking forward to are Postgate’s ‘Verdict of 12’ and the collection of impossible/ locked-room mysteries; the novels by Rolls and Austen-Leigh look interesting too. It’s a shame that the Collins Crime Club will only be reprinting what seems to be the weaker of Berkeley’s novels… Then again, JJ mentioned that Collins Crime Club will be re-publishing Rudolph Fisher’s ‘Conjure-Man’, which sounds interesting.

    Hopefully there will be interesting titles on the Pushkin Vertigo catalogue too. Also, it seems that Verse Chorus Press will be releasing one of June Wright’s Mother Paul novels sometime in the latter half of 2017.

    Would the Akunin/ Fandorin series need to be read in order? I’ve only read ‘Murder on Leviathan’.

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    • I’m glad I mentioned the Berkeley novel as I wouldn’t have been aware of its less appealing aspects otherwise. The only reason I didn’t mention Verdict of 12 or Conjure-Man is because I have read them already. Postgate’s novel would be my favourite of the two. I’ll be interested to see what both you and JJ make of the other novel as its style is quite different from other mystery novels published at the same time. I did have a brief look at forthcoming Puskin Vertigo books but they seem to be more in the modern/noir camp. Shame there isn’t another book by De Angelis. Thanks for letting me know about the Mother Paul book, as I have been wanting to try this series out but not been able to due to lack of availability. I read the Akunin novels in order and I think I got to enjoy how Fandorin develops as a character more. Normally I recommend people read the first book first, The Winter Queen and then maybe read out of order if you want, as I feel this first book sets up who Fandorin is and why he acts the way he does. I got very lucky one day in Oxfam and found someone had pretty much donated an intact collection of them.

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    • I didn’t realise this book by Berkeley was so bad. I was mainly curious because I hadn’t heard of it before, but I think your review excerpts have probably saved me from a frustrating read where I want to punch Roger all the time. Glad the Rolls books are good though. It is good that the Conjuror Man is being reprinted. It wasn’t in my list as I have already read it. Looking forward to reading your intro on Gill as I don’t know anything about her or her work. Hopefully be getting around to reading it next week.

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  6. Quoting from my review of Wychford over at MysteryFile:

    Wychford mainly seems to be about Roger’s (and the author’s) extreme antipathy toward the modern woman of the 1920s, as embodied in the tale by the flippant flapper Sheila. ( “I’m simply revelling in all this!” she shouts at one point, “It’s fun being a detective.”

    At various points Roger takes time to recommend the great need for modern women like Sheila to be spanked and to fume over these brazen females being so forward as to don male garments, pajamas. But Roger absolutely takes the cake with a jaw-droppingly misogynistic soliloquy on page 124:

    “Nearly all women,,,are idiots…charming idiots, delightful idiots, adorable idiots, if you like, but always idiots, and mostly damnable idiots as well; most women are potential devils, you know. They live entirely by their emotions, both in thought and deed, they are fundamentally incapable of reason and their one idea in life is to appear attractive to men.”

    Well! Now you know. Send the bill to Roger Sheringham. One has to wonder what the female writer E. M. Delafield, to whom Cox dedicated Wychford, made of all this.

    This telling bit about Roger, an Oxford graduate and successful novelist (sound familiar?) appears in The Silk Stocking Murders:

    Roger was a firm bachelor. He knew very little about women in general, and cared less; his heroines were the weakest part of his books.

    Cox himself was married twice, though neither time successfully. He also was considered the most trying member of the Detection Club (see my forthcoming pamphlet in CADS).

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  7. I’ve already read “All The World’s A Stage”, but I’m looking forward to the rest of the Fandorin novels. It would be great, if they would translate and publish Akunin’s non-series books too. I’ve always been interested in reading the quasi sequel to Crime And Punishment with the detective Porfiry Petrovitch investigating a new case, alas my Russian is not very good 🙂

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    • Have you read books 1-10 of the Fandorin series already? And also very jealous you’ve already read ATWAS! Did you enjoy it? I wasn’t aware of Akunin’s non-series books, though that’s probably a good thing if they’re not in English yet.

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      • ATWAS was the last of the series to be translated into German after that they stopped, I don’t know why, perhaps the last books didn’t sell as well as expected.

        I wouldn’t say it’s one of my favourite Fandorin books. One of the interesting things about this series is, that Fandorin ages throughout the books. Here he is already in his mid-fifties and infatuated by a much younger stage actress. In the process he makes a bit of a fool of himself. The actress is threatened by a stalker, but there is very little plot, although it does provide some fascinating insight into the world of early 20th century Russian theatre. Almost the entire last third of the book consists of a Japanese style stage play, if I’m not mistaken written by Masa (my memory is a bit hazy, since it’s been about 4-5 years when I read this). This reads a bit like the calm before the storm before all hells breaks loose and Russia gets plunged into the chaos of WWI and later the revolution. I think Akunin simply wrote this one for his own enjoyment without caring much about reader’s expectations.

        The funny thing is, when I was reading the earlier books in this series, already around book 5 or 6 I was expecting Fandorin to die at the end, it’s obvious that Akunin pays homage to the Russian classics, so I’m almost certain there will be a melancholic ending and he is most likely going to get killed.

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        • I like the fact that he ages in the books and thankfully unlike Poirot he begins the series in his early 20s so this kind of works. I knew that the series pushed into the 20th century so I am interested to see how this works out, as in some ways Fandorin has more of a Victorian air in my mind. I’ve not considered Fandorin’s death mainly because I knew there were later ones in the series, but I can see where you are coming from. I may need extra chocolate when reading the final Fandorin novel in this case. I always felt it a shame that Akunin only did three Sister Pelagia novels – though the way he ended them he can’t really add another on the end, though a prequel to the first book would be good.

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