The Library of America has done some great collections of American Noir in the last several years, but I really had to sit up and take notice when they released the two-volume set of Women Crime Writers of the 1940’s and 1950’s. The second book from the collection of four novels from the 1940’s was The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis (winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1947) and boy was it a doozy. Set in small women’s college in New […]

It was such a beautiful day that Maigret caught an open-air bus to the precinct and “he had gorged himself on images of a Paris colored like a children’s book.” That lovely mood is soon dashed when Maigret is called to investigate the death of an invalid, but it wasn’t just any old man in a wheelchair. This Corsican had been a central figure in the Parisian underworld and was even a sometime CI to Maigret over the years. The Chief Inspector knows that this […]

The Saint-Fiacre Affair is an early installment in the Maigret series, published in 1932. When a letter is received at the precinct stating that someone will die at the First Mass on All Saint’s Day in Saint-Fiacre, nobody takes it seriously. And frankly they are puzzled when Maigret quietly takes it upon himself to go to the tiny village to investigate. It turns out that Saint-Fiacre is Maigret’s birthplace, which he hasn’t seen in  35 years. When the Countess of Saint-Fiacre dies, seemingly of a […]

This was a delightful little Maigret, chiefly because Madame Maigret is at the heart of it and even does some sleuthing herself. Mention is made that this is the first that she had done so, which leads me to believe that The Madman of Bergerac (Appearances are deceiving) was later in the Maigret Mythos. At any rate, this was a splendid read. Madame Maigret has been seeing a new dentist and since the previous appointment is always running late, she has taken to sitting on […]

This debut novel by Ariel. S. Winter is built on a couple of gimmicks. It is three different novels set in three different decades intended to be read as one and each of the three novels is written in the style of three different greats in the world of noir: Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. Published by the excellent Hard Case Crime imprint, all of these factors added up to me saying, “oh hell, yes!” after spotting this on the shelf of my […]