Death in the Dark

I'm delighted to bring marvellous news for locked room mystery fans. Locked Room International will, at the start of March, be publishing Death in the Dark by Stacey Bishop. This novel, set in New York City, was originally published in 1930 as one of pair of books issue experimentally by Faber with pictorial boards and no dust jacket. It has subsequently become one of the most sought-after rarities among crime novels.

Prior to this edition, no English language reprint has ever appeared. I'm sure the arrival on the market of a nicely produced and very affordable copy will be greeted by collectors with a good deal of pleasure. John Pugmire of LRI deserves great credit for bringing the book back to life - and he's already been rewarded by a starred review in Publishers' Weekly.

I've written an introduction to this new edition, and there's also a fascinating Afterword written by the author's nephew and executor. Mystery has, suitably enough, long surrounded this book. Julian Symons talked about it in Bloody Murder, and suggested that there was in fact another Stacey Bishop book out there somewhere. Plenty of people, including me, have tried to track it down, but it now seems clear that this novel was a one-off.

And what a one-off! Symons, who revealed that the Bishop pen-name concealed the identity of a controversial composer called George Antheil, called it "an extraordinary performance". Bob Adey said it was "an extraordinarily complex work". As John said when interviewed by Publishers' Weekly, this is "probably the only literary work of any kind in history to have had three Nobel Prize winners involved in its creation." Does that whet your appetite? I thought it might....