Warming Up Some Cold Cases

After a couple of weeks under the able direction of George Kelley, Patti Abbott--back from vacation--has once more taken her seat as manager of the Friday “forgotten books” series. In addition to Andrew Taylor’s endorsement on this page of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin, today’s crop of unjustly neglected crime-fiction-related works includes: 77 Sunset Strip, by Roy Huggins; Eight Black Horses and Fiddlers, by Ed McBain; Cassidy’s Girl, by David Goodis; A Night at the Cemetery, by Anton Chekhov; The Big Bow Mystery, by Israel Zangwill; Death in Dreamtime, by S.H. Courtier; A Cool Breeze on the Underground, by Don Winslow; and the non-fiction book, Julian Symons Remembered: Tributes from Friends, compiled by John Walsdorf and Kathleen Symons.

Abbott has a full list of today’s participating writers, plus a trio of additional books worth remembering, in her own blog.

And because I didn’t make note of last Friday’s entries in this series, here’s a recap of some of those write-ups for your delectation: Drink to Yesterday, by Manning Coles; The Slavers, by Richard Telfair; This Is a Bust, by Ed Lin; The Greenway, by Jane Adams; Girls on Sin Street, by Larry Maddock; The Cambridge Murders, by Adam Broome; The Valley of Creeping Men, by Rayburn Crowley; Ritual in the Dark, by Colin Wilson; A Nun in the Closet, by Dorothy Gilman; and Of All the Bloody Cheek, by Frank McAuliffe; plus a collection of the vintage comic strip Secret Agent X-9, by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond, and a Secret Agent X-9 novel, Kingdom of Blue Corpses, by the pseudonymous Brant House; and a biography, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason, by Dorothy B. Hughes.