Another Wicked Bite From the National Coroner of Laos -- the One With 33 Teeth

Cotterill's Dr. Siri Paiboun became the chief medical examiner of Laos after that country's only doctor with a background in performing autopsies crossed the river into Thailand. Siri hoped to settle down with a state pension after helping the Communists force the Laotian royal family from power, but the party won't let him retire. So the good doctor studies old medical books and scratches for scarce supplies to perform the occasional cursory examination. He also enlivens the stories by making witty observations about the new regime to his weird band of cohorts.

The Coroner's Lunch

Thirty-Three Teeth

Disco for the Departed

The Sicilian Offense

“I would definitely write mysteries,” says Inspector Salvo Montalbano to a young colleague who suggests a career writing novels when the older man retires. “‘But it’s not worth the trouble… certain critics and professors, or would-be critics and professors, consider mystery novels a minor genre. And, in fact, in histories of literature they’re never even mentioned.”

That’s from Excursion to Tindari, a Montalbano novel by Andrea Camilleri about a tough, devious and brilliantly resourceful cop in a small Sicilian city named Vigata. When he’s not solving crimes -– this one concerns the death of a flashy young man and the disappearance of a dour elderly couple who live in the apartment below him – Montalbano likes to swim in the ocean outside his house, and eat spectacular food in his favorite trattoria as well as the splendid dishes left for him by his housekeeper.

Camilleri is probably the best mystery novelist that you’ve never heard of since Donna Leon, who has a kind word for him on the cover of Excursion to Tindari. His books, bestsellers in Europe and the basis of a popular Italian TV series, are published as paperback originals in the U.S. by Penguin, who make a serious effort with their artistic and evocative cover paintings. Also of great importance is the work of award-winning translator and poet Stephen Sartarelli.

If you haven’t crossed Inspector Montalbano’s exciting and often very funny path as yet, here’s where to start:

The Patience of the Spider

Rounding the Mark

The Smell of the Night

And when you’re done with those, there’s a new one, The Paper Moon, coming next year.

A Lost Archer

From somewhere in Literary Heaven, where his mind is as sharp as it was before the early attack of Alzheimer’s, Ross Macdonald must be smiling down on Tom Nolan – who has spent many years restoring Macdonald’s reputation as the best American mystery writer of all time.

Nolan’s biography, Ross Macdonald, is a masterpiece of art, compassion and dedication. He has found and collected many stories, published by Crippen & Landru, a house where lost mysteries are lovingly restored to life. And now comes this splendid collection.

The Archer Files, as Jeff Pierce at The Rap Sheet has already noted, collects for the first time all the brief Archer fiction: the stories from Macdonald’s 1955 paperback original The Name Is Archer, the additional tales included in the Otto Penzler-edited 1977 volume Lew Archer: Private Investigator, and the three then-unknown novellas presented in Crippen & Landru’s 2001 book Strangers in Town.

Also included in The Archer Files are several never-before-published fragments of unfinished Macdonald stories: “case notes” from the files of Lew Archer. As an added treat, Jeff Wong’s cover is adapted from a 1955 paperback original, but depicting Ross Macdonald rather than Lew Archer. The Archer Files is prefaced with Nolan’s biographical sketch of Lew Archer – a man as alive as his author.

Keep smiling down on Tom Nolan, Ross. He still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

For My First Trick...

These two terrific mysteries (written by Charles Ardai, the founder and editor of the amazing Hard Case Crime line) are the best thing since bread sliced with a bloody knife.

Ardai/Aleas writes with genius about a former cop turned private investigator named John Blake, who keeps on losing the people around him -- especially women he loves. He also takes savage beatings which slow him down but never stop him. Snap these up: they rank with the best of the masters that Hard Case publishes...