Staking Out a New Beat

HarperCollins Publishers announced yesterday that it has launched a new line of paperback mystery novels, to be called Bourbon Street Books.* It’s press release explains:

Bourbon Street Books will publish all types of mysteries and will feature paperback originals, reprints, backlist titles, and reissued classics. We will launch the line in the fall 2012 season with two paperback originals: The Hollow Man, an exciting debut by British author Oliver Harris, and Blood Line, the 7th book in the Anna Travis series by international bestselling author Lynda La Plante, both publishing on October 23rd. We will also bring back into print Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey with Harriet Vane series for the launch on October 16th, including Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Busman’s Honeymoon, and Gaudy Night. Nick Drake’s Egypt: The Book of Chaos will release as a trade paperback in December under this new line.

For the winter 2013 season, we will be reissuing four Mary Kay Andrews novels--Happy Never After, Homemade Sin, To Live and Die in Dixie, Every Crooked Nanny--all of which were originally written under her real name, Kathy Hogan Trocheck, and will now be published under Mary Kay Andrews for the first time in March. Nicola Upson’s next entry in her Josephine Tey series, Fear in the Sunlight, will be published in April. The new book in Michael Stanley’s acclaimed Detective Kubu series, and a spy thriller called The Geneva Option by debut author Adam LeBor will publish under this new line in the summer 2013 season.

A dedicated Facebook page has already been created in support of this new Bourbon Street Books line.

* Not that it matters, but I wonder whether the Bourbon Street Books moniker is a tribute to Bourbon Street Beat, the 1959-1960 ABC-TV sleuth series starring Richard Long and Andrew Duggan. If so, it’s an obscure one, but fun.