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The Daily Sherlock Holmes
A Year of Quotes from the Case-Book of the World’s Greatest Detective
Arthur Conan Doyle
University of Chicago Press, 2019
“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.
“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
“How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.
“Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself.

At that first sight of Watson, Sherlock Holmes made brilliant deductions. But even he couldn’t know that their meeting was inaugurating a friendship that would make himself and the good Doctor cultural icons, as popular as ever more than a century after their 1887 debut. Through four novels and fifty-six stories, Arthur Conan Doyle led the pair through dramatic adventures that continue to thrill readers today, offering an unmatched combination of skillful plotting, period detail, humor, and distinctive characters. For a Holmes fan, there are few pleasures comparable to returning to his richly imagined world—the gaslit streets of Victorian London, the companionable clutter of 221B Baker Street, the reliable fuddlement (and nerves of steel) of Watson, the perverse genius of Holmes himself.

It’s all there in The Daily Sherlock Holmes, the perfect bedside companion for fans of the world’s only consulting detective. Within these pages readers will find a quotation for every day of the year, drawn from across the Conan Doyle canon. Beloved characters and familiar lines recall favorite stories and scenes, while other passages remind us that Conan Doyle had a way with description and a ready wit. Moriarty and Mycroft, Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson; the Hound, the Red-Headed League, the Speckled Band, and the dread Reichenbach Falls—it’s all here, anchored, of course, in that unforgettable duo of Holmes and Watson. No book published this year will bring a Holmes fan more pleasure. Come, readers. The game is afoot.
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The Dame
An Alan Grofield Novel
Richard Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake also completed a separate series in the Parker universe, starring Alan Grofield, an occasional colleague of Parker. While he shares events and characters with several Parker novels, Grofield is less calculating and more hot-blooded than Parker; think fewer guns, more dames.

Not that there isn’t violence and adventure aplenty. . The Dame finds Grofield in Puerto Rico protecting a rich, demanding woman in her isolated jungle villa, and reluctantly assuming the role of detective. A rare Westlake take on a whodunit, The Dame features a cast of colorful characters and a suspenseful—and memorable—climax.

With a new foreword by Sarah Weinman that situates the Grofield series within Westlake’s work as a whole, this novel is an exciting addition to any crime fiction fan’s library.

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The Damsel
An Alan Grofield Novel
Richard Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Donald E. Westlake is one of the greats of crime fiction. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, he wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hardboiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists. Using the same nom de plume, Westlake also completed a separate series in the Parker universe, starring Alan Grofield, an occasional colleague of Parker. While he shares events and characters with several Parker novels, Grofield is less calculating and more hot-blooded than Parker; think fewer guns, more dames.

Not that there isn’t violence and adventure aplenty. The Damsel begins directly after the Parker novel The Handle. Following a wounded Grofield and his damsel on a scenic, action-packed road trip from Mexico City to Acapulco, The Damsel is full of wit, adrenaline, and political intrigue.
 
With a new foreword by Sarah Weinman that situates the Grofield series within Westlake’s work as a whole, these novels are an exciting addition to any crime fiction fan’s library.
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Darkly Perfect World
Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir
Stanley Orr
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
Stanley Orr’s Darkly Perfect World offers a large-scale historical narrative about the way American crime fiction and film have changed throughout the twentieth century. Orr argues that films noirs and noir fictions dramatize Raymond Chandler’s pronouncement that “Even in death, a man has a right to his own identity.” Orr illuminates a noir ethos committed to “authenticating alienation”: subjectivity managed through radical polarization of Self and Other. Distinguishing a heretofore unrecognized context for American noir, Orr demonstrates that Chandler and Dashiell Hammett arrive at this subject within and against the colonial adventure genre. While the renegades of Joseph Conrad and Louis Becke project a figure vulnerable to shifts in cultural context, the noir protagonist exemplifies alienated selfhood and often performs a “continental operation” against the slippages of the colonial adventurer. But even as Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and other noir virtuosi persist with this revision of late Victorian adventure, Chester Himes, Dorothy Hughes, and John Okada experiment with hard-boiled alienation for a subversion of noir that resonates throughout literary postmodernism. In their respective avant-garde novels, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Paul Auster expose what K.W. Jeter terms the “darkly perfect world” of noir, thus giving rise to and enabling the con men and “connected guys” of contemporary films noirs such as Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, David Fincher’s Seven, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
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The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight
Metta Fuller Victor
Duke University Press, 2003
Before Raymond Chandler, before Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie, there was Metta Fuller Victor, the first American author—man or woman—of a full-length detective novel. This novel, The Dead Letter, is presented here along with another of Victor’s mysteries, The Figure Eight. Both written in the 1860s and published under the name Seeley Regester, these novels show how—by combining conventions of the mystery form first developed by Edgar Allan Poe with those of the domestic novel—Victor pioneered the domestic detective story and paved the way for generations of writers to follow.

In The Dead Letter, Henry Moreland is killed by a single stab to the back. Against a background of post–Civil War politics, Richard Redfield, a young attorney, helps Burton, a legendary New York City detective, unravel the crime. In The Figure Eight, Joe Meredith undertakes a series of adventures and assumes a number of disguises to solve the mystery of the murder of his uncle and regain the lost fortune of his angelic cousin.

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The Dead of Achill Island
Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Art historian Nora Barnes and her husband, Toby Sandler, are visiting West Ireland for a family reunion. During a morning walk through a deserted village on Achill Island, Nora stumbles upon a body—her notorious uncle Bert. When a clue singles out her mother as the likely suspect, Nora and Toby are on the case to clear her name. Whether in a barroom brawl or the sauna of a swingers’ club, Toby has Nora’s back. As they search, the dead of Achill seem to speak from graveyards, ruined churches, and megalithic tombs. A second murder makes it all the more difficult to connect the dots. And when Nora and Toby become the next targets, their own survival is at stake.
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Deadly Edge
A Parker Novel
Richard Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Deadly Edge bids a brutal adieu to the 1960s as Parker robs a rock concert, and the heist goes south. Soon Parker finds himself—and his woman, Claire—menaced by a pair of sadistic, strung-out killers who want anything but a Summer of Love. Parker has a score to settle while Claire’s armed with her first rifle—and they’re both ready to usher in the end of the Age of Aquarius.

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Death at Gills Rock
A Dave Cubiak Door County Mystery
Patricia Skalka
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
Dave Cubiak is back!

After tracking a clever killer in Death Stalks Door County, park ranger and former Chicago homicide detective Dave Cubiak is elected Door County sheriff. His newest challenge arrives as spring brings not new life but tragic death to the isolated fishing village of Gills Rock. Three prominent World War II veterans, about to be honored for their military heroics, die from carbon monoxide poisoning during a weekly card game.

Blame falls to a faulty heater but Cubiak puzzles over details. When one of the widows receives a message claiming the men "got what they deserved," he realizes that there may be more to the deaths than a simple accident.

Investigating, Cubiak discovers that the men's veneer of success and respectability hides an intricate web of lies, betrayal, and treachery.

In a dark, moody tale that spans more than half a century and hopscotches across the peninsula, Cubiak encounters a host of suspects with motives for murder. Amid broken dreams, corruption, and loss, he sorts out the truth.

Death at Gills Rock is the second book in the Dave Cubiak Door County Mystery series.

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Death Before Compline
Short Stories by Sharan Newman
Sharan Newman
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012

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Death by the Bay
Patricia Skalka
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
On a chilly Monday in late spring, Sheriff Dave Cubiak is at the Green Arbor Lodge for lunch when a scream from a nearby medical conference disrupts the scene. Leaping into action, he finds the ninety-three-year-old director of the prestigious Institute for Progressive Medicine collapsed on the floor, dead of a suspected heart attack. As Cubiak interrogates the witnesses, he’s struck by the inconsistencies in their stories. Some evade questions while others offer contradictory statements. Then suddenly another scream pierces the air. . . . Past and present merge as long-buried secrets rise to the surface. The resourceful sheriff must rely on his skills and wits, along with the advice and memories of friends and family, to uncover the dark truth behind the Institute for Progressive Medicine. Dedicated and new fans alike will find themselves captivated by this intelligently plotted story as Cubiak untangles the twisted threads of this intricate mystery.
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Death Casts a Shadow
Patricia Skalka
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
With Door County caught in the grip of a fierce winter storm, Sheriff Dave Cubiak agrees to do a simple favor for a friend of his wife: he stops by to check in on an affluent widow with a questionable new suitor. His initial disquiet is easily dismissed—until she is found dead the next morning in her home. Lying at the bottom of a flight of stairs, clutching a valuable bronze sculpture, she points her outstretched hand in the direction of a nearby, nondescript ring.
 
The scene bears all the characteristics of an accidental fall, not unheard of for a person of her age, but something is not adding up. Later that week, an explosion in an ice fishing shack on the frozen bay leads to the discovery of another body, burned beyond recognition. Was this the widow’s missing handyman? Could the two deaths be related? With what has become a hallmark for books in the series, past and present collide as Cubiak’s search for answers uncovers the sad legacy of loneliness and the disquieting links between wealth and poverty on the peninsula.
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Death Claims
A Dave Branstetter Mystery
Joseph Hansen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Death Claims is the second of Joseph Hansen's acclaimed mysteries featuring ruggedly masculine Dave Brandstetter, a gay insurance investigator. When John Oats's body is found washed up on a beach, his young lover April Stannard is sure it was no accident. Brandstetter agrees: Oats's college-age son, the beneficiary of the life insurance policy, has gone missing.
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A Death in Bali
A Jenna Murphy Mystery
Nancy Tingley
Ohio University Press, 2018

Intrepid young curator-turned-private eye Jenna Murphy—whom readers first met in A Head in Cambodia—goes to the tourist town of Ubud to study early twentieth-century Balinese painting. But her first discovery when she arrives in Indonesia is the speared body of expat artist Flip Hendricks. She soon is working with an old friend, a detective for the Ubud police force, to seek the killer. Jenna suspects the motive for the killing has to do with Flip’s paintings. Detective Wayan Tyo is not so sure.

Is Jenna right, or are there other forces at work in this paradise overrun with tourists? The threats to Jenna’s safety pile up, until she can no longer deny that her life is in danger. Her entanglement with various men only clouds her judgment and complicates the situation.

As she did in the first Jenna Murphy book, in A Death in Bali, Nancy Tingley draws on her extensive experience as a scholar of Asian art to bring the armchair traveler an immersive, inside view of the art world.

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Death in Cold Water
Patricia Skalka
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
On a bracing autumn day in Door County, a prominent philanthropist disappears. Is the elderly Gerald Sneider—known as "Mr. Packer" for his legendary support of Green Bay football—suffering from dementia or just avoiding his greedy son? Is there a connection to threats against the National Football League? As tourists flood the peninsula for the fall colors, Sheriff Dave Cubiak's search for Sneider is stymied by the FBI. When human bones wash up on the Lake Michigan shore, the sheriff has more to worry about than a missing man.
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A Death in Harlem
A Novel
Karla FC Holloway
Northwestern University Press, 2019

In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla FC Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous “death by misadventure” at the climax of Nella Larsen’s Passing, Holloway accompanies readers to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem’s first “colored” policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.

Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing—passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas’s  investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem.

A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.

 
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Death of a Department Chair
A Novel
Lynn C. Miller
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
In Death of a Department Chair, protagonist Miriam Held recounts the events of the previous fall when she was suspected of killing Isabel Vittorio, the chair of her department and her former lover. The controversial and contrary Vittorio was, at the time of her death, attempting to block the hire of a brilliant African American female professor. Already under siege for her attempts to increase diversity on campus, Miriam is forced to defend her reputation and her life. As she searches for the truth, Miriam amasses evidence that leaves few friends and colleagues free from suspicion. Both a classic whodunit and a witty satire, Death of a Department Chair dramatizes how communities can create the very climate of mistrust and paranoia that victimizes them.
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Death of a Writer
Collins, Michael
University of Iowa Press, 2021
For Robert Pendleton, a professor clinging to tenure and living in the shambles of his once-bright literary career, death seems to be the only remaining option. But his suicide attempt fails, halted at the last moment by the intervention of Adi Wiltshire, a graduate student battling her own demons of failure and thwarted ambition. During Pendleton's long convalescence, Adi discovers a novel hidden in his basement: a brilliant, semi-autobiographical story with a gruesome child-murder at its core.

The publication of Scream causes a storm of publicity: a whirlwind into which Adi, Horowitz and the still-incapacitated Pendleton are thrust. The novel is treated as an existential masterpiece and looks set to bring its author the success he's always sought – when, ironically, he is no longer in a condition to appreciate it – until questions begin to be asked about its content: in particular about the uncanny resemblance between Pendleton's fictional crime and a real-life, unresolved local murder. Enter Jon Ryder, a world-weary detective who could have walked off the pages of a police thriller, and the hunt for the murderer is on.
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The Death of the Detective
A Novel
Mark Smith
Northwestern University Press, 2007
A madman is on the loose in the city. Alone and on the verge of psychic collapse, detective Arnold Magnuson follows clues in murder's wake--through the Chicago of society clubs and nightclubs and the city of small-time hoods and big-time Mafia, the slums smelling of machine oil and riverside tanneries and pristine lakeside villages--through subtle interrogations, split-second lies, and improvised stories, moving ever closer to a culprit who begins to feel alarmingly like himself.

The Death of the Detective is a quest novel in the tradition of Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, and Dead Souls. During his frenetic and blood-soaked odyssey, Mark Smith's detective moves through the city on highways, boulevards, side streets, and alleys. He tracks "the death-maker" from a mansion in Lake Forest to the underbelly of the South Side, from a glass high-rise on the Gold Coast to a run-down tavern in the northwestern suburbs, and everywhere in between. In this New York Times best seller and finalist for the 1974 National Book Award, Smith takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go until the last page of his relentless journey into the dark recesses of the American soul.
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Death on a Starry Night
Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
When art historian Nora Barnes returns to France for a Van Gogh conference in the charming medieval village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, she’s expecting a vigorous debate about whether the famed artist’s suicide was actually a homicide. But on the night before the conference, an elderly French woman who’d promised to reveal important evidence is found face down in the village fountain, and her Chanel briefcase is nowhere to be seen.
            During a week of academic squabbling, dining, romance, and suspense, the quirky conference members, one by one, fall under police suspicion and the amused gaze of Nora’s husband, Toby Sandler. But someone wants to stop Nora and Toby’s amateur sleuthing, and what happens next is no joke.
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Death Rides the Ferry
Patricia Skalka
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
It’s a sparkling August day on Washington Island and the resonant notes of early classical music float on the breeze toward the sailboats and ferries that ply the waters of Death’s Door strait. After a forty-year absence, the Viola da Gamba Music Festival has returned to the picturesque isle on the tip of Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula. Sheriff Dave Cubiak enjoys a rare day off as tourists and a documentary film crew hover around the musicians.
 
The jubilant mood sours when an unidentified passenger is found dead on a ferry. Longtime residents recall with dismay the disastrous festival decades earlier, when another woman died and a valuable sixteenth-century instrument—the fabled yellow viol—vanished, never to be found.
 
Cubiak follows a trail of murder, kidnapping, and false identity that leads back to the calamitous night of the twin tragedies. With the lives of those he holds most dear in peril, the sheriff pursues a ruthless killer into the stormy northern reaches of Lake Michigan.
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Death Rides the Ferry
Patricia Skalka
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
It’s a sparkling August day on Washington Island and the resonant notes of early classical music float on the breeze toward the sailboats and ferries that ply the waters of Death’s Door strait. After a forty-year absence, the Viola da Gamba Music Festival has returned to the picturesque isle on the tip of Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula. Sheriff Dave Cubiak enjoys a rare day off as tourists and a documentary film crew hover around the musicians.
 
The jubilant mood sours when an unidentified passenger is found dead on a ferry. Longtime residents recall with dismay the disastrous festival decades earlier, when another woman died and a valuable sixteenth-century instrument—the fabled yellow viol—vanished, never to be found.
 
Cubiak follows a trail of murder, kidnapping, and false identity that leads back to the calamitous night of the twin tragedies. With the lives of those he holds most dear in peril, the sheriff pursues a ruthless killer into the stormy northern reaches of Lake Michigan.
[more]

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Death Sentences
Kawamata Chiaki
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Japan, 1980s: A special police squad is tracking down one of the “afflicted” to recover the “stuff.” Although the operation seems like a drug bust, the “stuff” is actually some kind of text. Death Sentences—a work of science fiction that shares its conceit with the major motion picture The Ring—tells the story of a mysterious surrealist poem, penned in the 1940s, which, through low-tech circulation across time, kills its readers, including Arshile Gorky and Antonin Artaud, before sparking a wave of suicides after its publication in 1980s Japan. Mixing elements of Japanese hard-boiled detective story, horror, and science fiction, the novel ranges across time and space, from the Left Bank of Paris to the planet Mars.

Paris, 1948: André Breton anxiously awaits a young poet, Who May. He recalls their earlier encounter in New York City and the mysterious effects of reading Who May’s poem “Other World.” Upon meeting, Who May gives Breton another poem, “Mirror,” an even more unsettling work. Breton shares it with his fellow surrealists. Before Breton can discuss the poem with him, Who May vanishes. Who May contacts Breton about a third poem, “The Gold of Time,” and then slips into a coma and dies (or enters another dimension). Copies of the poem are mailed to all of Who May’s friends—Breton, Gorky, Paul Éluard, Marcel Duchamp, and other famous surrealists and dadaists. Thus begins the “magic poem plague.”

Death Sentences is the first novel by the popular and critically acclaimed science fiction author Kawamata Chiaki to be published in English. Released in Japan in 1984 as Genshi-gari (Hunting the magic poems), Death Sentences was a best seller and won the Japan Science Fiction Grand Prize. With echoes of such classic sci-fi works as George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, Death Sentences is a fascinating mind-bender with a style all its own.

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Death Stalks Door County
Patricia Skalka, narrated by Adam Prugh
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Six deaths mar the holiday mood as summer vacationers enjoy Wisconsin’s beautiful Door County peninsula. Murders, or bizarre accidents? Newly hired park ranger Dave Cubiak, a former Chicago homicide detective, assumes the worst but refuses to get involved. Grief-stricken and guilt-ridden over the loss of his wife and daughter, he’s had enough of death.
            Forced to confront the past, the morose Cubiak moves beyond his own heartache and starts investigating, even as a popular festival draws more people into possible danger. In a desperate search for clues, Cubiak uncovers a tangled web of greed, betrayal, bitter rivalries, and lost love beneath the peninsula’s travel-brochure veneer. Befriended by several locals but unsure whom to trust or to suspect of murder, the one-time cop tracks a clever killer.
            In a setting of stunning natural beauty and picturesque waterfront villages, Death Stalks Door County introduces a new detective series, “The Dave Cubiak Door County Mysteries.”

Finalist, Traditional Fiction 2014 Book of the Year Award, Chicago Writers Association
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Death Stalks Door County
Patricia Skalka
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
Six deaths mar the holiday mood as summer vacationers enjoy Wisconsin’s beautiful Door County peninsula. Murders, or bizarre accidents? Newly hired park ranger Dave Cubiak, a former Chicago homicide detective, assumes the worst but refuses to get involved. Grief-stricken and guilt-ridden over the loss of his wife and daughter, he’s had enough of death.
            Forced to confront the past, the morose Cubiak moves beyond his own heartache and starts investigating, even as a popular festival draws more people into possible danger. In a desperate search for clues, Cubiak uncovers a tangled web of greed, betrayal, bitter rivalries, and lost love beneath the peninsula’s travel-brochure veneer. Befriended by several locals but unsure whom to trust or to suspect of murder, the one-time cop tracks a clever killer.
            In a setting of stunning natural beauty and picturesque waterfront villages, Death Stalks Door County introduces a new detective series, “The Dave Cubiak Door County Mysteries.”

Finalist, Traditional Fiction 2014 Book of the Year Award, Chicago Writers Association
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Death Washes Ashore
Patricia Skalka
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
In the wake of a brutal storm that lashed the Door County peninsula, Sheriff Dave Cubiak assesses the damage: broken windows, downed trees, and piles of mysterious debris along the shoreline. He leaves the comfort of his home and heads out into the aftermath, checking in with folks along the way to offer help. His assistant, marooned at the justice center overnight, calls with an ominous message about a body discovered on the beach. When the medical examiner discovers the man didn’t simply drown during the storm, Cubiak searches for answers.
 
Chasing leads, the sheriff learns the victim directed a troupe of live-action role players living in an ersatz Camelot. In a setting where pretense in the norm, Cubiak must determine if suspects are who they say they are or if their made-up identities conceal a ruthless killer. As tensions escalate among neighbors unhappy about the noise and commotion, the sheriff discovers that more than one person on the peninsula has a motive for murder.
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Deception on All Accounts
Sara Sue Hoklotubbe
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Is murder always a simple transaction? Don't bank on it.

Sadie Walela's life is about to be turned upside down.

One morning Sadie unlocks the door at the Mercury Savings Bank and confronts a robber who's been lying in wait for her and her fellow employees. He flees after stealing money and killing her coworker. When a whirlwind of events leaves Sadie herself under suspicion, she sets out to clear her name.

This banker turned sleuth is suddenly plunged into an unfamiliar world in which people are not always as they appear—not her employer, not the homeless man she's befriended, not the police officer who takes an interest in the case, not the man she falls in love with. And, as she's beginning to imagine, not even herself.

Sadie is a blue-eyed Cherokee living in northeastern Oklahoma, a half-blood who finds she sometimes has to adapt to get by in the white man's world. As she faces adversity at each bend in the road, she adapts and moves forward, much as her father's ancestors did. But as she comes to term with murder, romance, and her hopes for a career, Sadie finds deception on all accounts.

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The Defective Detective in the Pulps
Edited by Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983
The world of the defective detective was a strange one. Continuing the motif of the mythological hero, this unique detective type emerged in the 1930s in a very imperfect and threatened society. The stories reprinted in this volume reveal just how widely the genre ranged during the Depression.
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Detection and Its Designs
Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction
Peter Thoms
Ohio University Press, 1998
Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure. Detection and Its Designs reads early detective fiction as a self-conscious form that is suspicious of the detective it ostensibly celebrates, and critical of the authorial power he wields in attempting to reconstruct the past and script a narrative of the crime.

In readings of Godwin's Caleb Williams, Poe's Dupin stories, Dickens's Bleak House, Collins's The Moonstone, and Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Thoms argues that the detective's figurative writing emerges out of a desire to exert control over others and sometimes over himself.

Detection and Its Designs demonstrates that, far from being a naïve form, early detective fiction grapples with the medium of storytelling itself. To pursue these inward-turning fictions is to uncover the detective's motives of controlling the representation of both himself and others, a discovery that in turn significantly undermines the authority of his solutions.
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Dirty Money
A Parker Novel
Richard Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Together at last. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, Donald E. Westlake, one of the greats of crime fiction, wrote twenty-four fast-paced, hard-boiled novels featuring Parker, a shrewd career criminal with a talent for heists and a code all his own. With the publication of the last four Parker novels Westlake wrote—Breakout, Nobody Runs Forever, Ask the Parrot, and Dirty Money—the University of Chicago Press pulls the ultimate score: for the first time ever, the entire Parker series will be available from a single publisher.

Parker’s got a new fence and a new plan to get the loot back from a botched job in Dirty Money, but a bounty hunter, the FBI, and the local cops are on his tail. Only his brains, his cool, and the help of his lone longtime dame, Claire, can keep him one step ahead of the cars and the guns.

Featuring new forewords by Chris Holm, Duane Swierczynski, and Laura Lippman—celebrated crime writers, all—these masterworks of noir are the capstone to an extraordinary literary run that will leave you craving more. Written over the course of fifty years, the Parker novels are pure artistry, adrenaline, and logic both brutal and brilliant. Join Parker on his jobs and read them all again or for the first time. But don’t talk to the law.
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Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes
Larry Millett
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

SHERLOCK HOLMES DISAPPEARS, POLICE SUSPECT FAMED DETECTIVE IN KIDNAPPING AND MURDER reads a New York headline. So begins the fifth mystery in Larry Millett’s series.

A letter, written in a secret cipher he recognizes all too well, reveals that an old foe of Holmes—a murderer he once captured after an incredible duel of wits—is back, has kidnapped his previous victim’s widow, and is now impersonating Holmes himself. Holmes must once again match wits with a particularly cunning adversary, one whose hatred of Holmes has seemingly become the killer’s single greatest obsession.

Chasing the kidnapper from London to New York to Chicago, Holmes and Watson race to keep up. Every move Holmes makes is expected; every trap proves elusive. Only with the assistance of his American cohort, the saloonkeeper Shadwell Rafferty, can Holmes hope to settle the score once and for all—or be framed for the crime himself.

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Discipline
Debra Spark
Four Way Books, 2024

How does art mirror and shape our lives? Can it transcend the boundaries of time, wealth, and circumstance? Debra Spark—whose previous work the Washington Post described as "richly imaginative" and "real world magic"—explores these themes in her new novel Discipline. With a trio of important paintings missing, the book weaves together three narratives that span almost a century. From an inhumane boarding school in Maine in the late 1970s to a contemporary Boston art appraiser struggling with raising a teen to the long-lost love letters between a painter and his wife, Discipline is a propulsive literary mystery about family strife and devotion, ambition and authorship, and the abiding and mysterious power of art.

Inspired by the life and family of Walt Kuhn (the painter responsible for the 1913 Armory Show that introduced Americans to modernism) and the scandal-ridden Elan boarding school that was forced to shut down in 2011, this richly drawn, suspenseful novel shows Spark at her most masterful.
 

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Document of Expectations
Devon Abbott Mihesuah
Michigan State University Press, 2011

When Hopi/White Mountain Apache anthropologist Tony M. Smokerise is found murdered in his office at Central Highlands University, the task of solving the crime falls to jaded Choctaw detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Charles T. Clarke. A seemingly tolerant and amicable office of higher education, the university, Monique soon learns, harbors parties determined to destroy the careers of Tony and his best friend, the volatile Oglala anthropologist Roxanne Badger. In the course of her investigation, Monique discovers that the scholars who control Tony’s department are also overseeing the excavation of a centuries-old tribal burial site that was uncovered during the construction of a freeway. Tony’s role in the project, she realizes, might be the key to identifying his murderer. This virtuosic mystery novel explores, in engrossing detail, the complex motives for a killing within the sometimes furtive and hermetic setting of academia.

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Dr. Joe Bell
Model for Sherlock Holmes
Ely M. Liebow
University of Wisconsin Press, 1982

     A distinguished physician and professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, and a forensic expert for the British Crown, Joseph Bell was well known for his remarkable powers of observation and deduction. In what would become true Sherlockian fashion, he had the ability to deduce facts about his patients from otherwise unremarkable details. In one instance recounted by Arthur Conan Doyle himself—and similar to Sherlock Holmes's own observations in "The Greek Interpreter"—Bell took little time to determine that one of his patients had recently served in the army, a non-commissioned officer discharged from his Highland regiment stationed in Barbados:

“The man was a respectful man, but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantitis, which is West Indian and not British.”

     Based on extensive research into the life of Bell and including tantalizing accounts of the connections between Bell and Conan Doyle, this biography is required reading for anyone interested in Victorian medicine, in the history of detective fiction, and in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

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Dreams for Dead Bodies
Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction
M. Michelle Robinson
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and  the Corpus of American Detective Fiction offers new arguments about the origins of detective fiction in the United States, tracing the lineage of the genre back to unexpected texts and uncovering how authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Rudolph Fisher made use of the genre’s puzzle-elements to explore the shifting dynamics of race and labor in America.
 
The author constructs an interracial genealogy of detective fiction to create a nuanced picture of the ways that black and white authors appropriated and cultivated literary conventions that coalesced in a recognizable genre at the turn of the twentieth century. These authors tinkered with detective fiction’s puzzle-elements to address a variety of historical contexts, including the exigencies of chattel slavery, the erosion of working-class solidarities by racial and ethnic competition, and accelerated mass production. Dreams for Dead Bodies demonstrates that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature was broadly engaged with detective fiction, and that authors rehearsed and refined its formal elements in literary works typically relegated to the margins of the genre. By looking at these margins, the book argues, we can better understand the origins and cultural functions of American detective fiction.
 
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A Driftless Murder
Jerry McGinley
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
As he finishes a cup of his morning coffee, retired cop and former detective Pat Donegal gets a curious call from the Kickapoo County Chief Deputy Hennie Duggan. A gruesome discovery of human remains on a ridge portends grisly possibilities that neither man wants to consider. Donegal, physically and emotionally hungover from a rough break-up, is known for his unorthodox methods and a tendency to bend the rules. Even though Duggan chafes at his style, he knows he needs a skilled investigator like Donegal to have his back.
 
As strange details continue to emerge, the detectives enlist the help of city cop and data expert Shea Sommers. As the team crisscrosses the state to chase a few promising leads, their search expands beyond local guides and neighbors to members of a sinister, secret hunting society. When Duggan mysteriously disappears—and becomes a suspect himself—Donegal must take over the investigation. He soon realizes the case might not only be unsolvable but could land him in prison—or an early grave.
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Duty To Warn
A Novel
Sara Kersting
Acre Books, 2018
While treating Robert Percy, a burly factory worker, psychologist David Malden unlocks not only his patient’s memories of childhood abuse but also an upwelling violence. When Percy abruptly departs Buffalo for rural Michigan, where he grew up in a series of foster homes, Malden fears that his patient seeks revenge. Concerned with his liability under Duty to Warn laws, Malden sets out after the troubled young man using the only guide he has, his treatment notes—a list of people and places that may or may not exist, especially after twenty years.
To aid him in the chase, Malden calls on his colleague, the awkward, remote, intimidatingly tall Sonja Nielsen. She reluctantly agrees to help, either because of or despite her previous entanglements with Malden.
 
Told from the perspectives of these three characters, the story swerves and jolts and switches back, much like Percy’s recollections of his upbringing. Kersting presents the interior struggles of her characters in a searingly spare style, all the while drawing the reader through an escalating series of events as Percy hitches rides and takes buses, searching the small towns of central Michigan, alternately helped and hindered by both old and new acquaintances.
 
While following disparate leads toward Percy’s final, surprising destination, all three conflicted souls are compelled to examine their loyalties, test their convictions, admit their frailties, and confront the ghosts lurking in their pasts, resulting in a revelatory climax.
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