The excellent British television series Prime Suspect, starring Helen Mirren, is certainly worth a book-length discussion, and this one is a sound-enough effort—and the authors know the history of the police procedural well enough to mention names like Lawrence Treat, Hilary Waugh, and Dorothy Uhnak. Still, it would be more entertaining and instructive to acquire the DVDs and view the programs again. The book emphasizes social issues, gender roles, and all those things academic writers on crime fiction and film obsess on, while giving no sense of the pleasure to be gained from the genre. The authors, a criminologist and a sociologist, list “four elements of a progressive” moral fiction, and their main thrust is a striving for political correctness (in the broadest sense), measuring how well the series lives up to contemporary progressive attitudes. While that’s fair enough, few will read this for pleasure. An appendix summarizes the seven episodes in the series.

References to Raymond Chandler’s Murder My Sweet, dated 1944, and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) serve to confuse novels with their movie adaptations.

The author, whose pioneering Ellery Queen study Royal Bloodline appeared nearly 40 years ago, calls this an “everything book” about the team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, along the lines of his Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die (1988). The comparison is apt. There is more biographical material on the Queen team than has appeared in print anywhere else, drawing on files of their correspondence, 12 pages of photographs, plus a full novel-by-novel, story-by-story critical survey. Also given full coverage are editorial work; film, radio, and television adaptations; and the ghost-written paperbacks of the 1960s. Appended are “EQMM: The Dannay Years” and “At Work and Play with Fred Dannay,” an account of Nevins’ personal relationship with Ellery Queen’s editorial half. A 35-page primary and secondary bibliography and 24-page index round out this meticulously researched, highly readable, and important book.

The exciting true tale of Allan Pinkerton's dash to save President-elect Abraham Lincoln.

One-eighth Choctaw author Todd Downing (1902-1974) wrote nine classical detective novels, most set in Mexico, published between 1933 and 1941. Following a substantial biographical and critical summary by Curtis Evans, who is becoming the foremost contemporary scholar of Golden Age detective fiction, are nearly 300 mystery reviews Downing contributed to the Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman between 1930 and 1937. Almost all have annotations, sometimes highlighting a point in the review but more often providing useful information about the subject authors, many unfamiliar today even to specialists. Downing was always readable and could make even books he didn’t especially like sound interesting to the right reader. Though a fairly gentle critic, he was a master of faint praise and could be very funny when he turned acerbic. His enthusiasm for Rufus King (whom he compared to Hammett at one point) and Mignon G. Eberhart may lead readers to rediscover them. He had a soft spot for Edgar Wallace, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and other thriller specialists of his formative years. Appendices include some non-mystery fiction reviews, an interview from 1934, a review of Howard Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure, a 1943 essay on the mystery craft, articles about Downing in the Daily Oklahoman, an index to authors reviewed, and an addendum on a Harry Stephen Keeler novel. The book is an important addition to our knowledge, not just of an unfairly neglected writer but of the whole mystery scene in a misunderstood and often mischaracterized decade. Bill Pronzini provides a preface and is credited as a consultant on the annotations.