Classic Crime Novels, Newly Reissued and as Thrilling as Ever
Our columnist on seven terrific mysteries deservedly back in print.
By Sarah Weinman
I’m delighted by how many classic crime novels are being reissued these days. Here are a few recent favorites, which span over a century of excellent storytelling.
Nothing but Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging
By Mary Fortune
Fortune, arguably the first woman to write a detective fiction series, did not shy away from hardscrabble descriptions of Australia — particularly Melbourne — replete with violent and petty crime. She could also be very arch and funny. This collection cements her place as one of the genre’s earliest, and finest, detective story writers.
Before the Fact
By Francis Iles
Francis Iles (1893-1971) was one of the English crime writer Anthony Berkeley Cox’s many pen names. Praise is rightly heaped on Iles’s debut, “Malice Aforethought,” the 1931 novel that begins with the famous line “It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Doctor Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter.”
Iles offers a master class in ratcheting up suspense as Lina, consumed with terror, descends into madness. It’s no wonder that Alfred Hitchcock adapted the novel as “Suspicion,” though even he couldn’t quite match Iles’s ability to ensnare the audience in Lina’s torturous web.
To Catch a Thief
By David Dodge
Speaking of Hitchcock, another one of the many books he adapted into film has rightfully resurfaced in print, originally published in 1952, “another potboiler that just might go as far as the paperback reprints.”
Tokyo Expresss
By Seicho Matsumoto
Matsumoto (1909-92) wrote a great many detective novels, but his masterpiece, first published in Japan in 1958, is Tokyo Express. It stands out thanks to the “elegant spareness of the prose,” as Amor Towles writes in his introduction, but also because of the ingenuity of the tightly coiled plot.
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/books/review/new-mystery-novels.html