So Kate is running the Dream Reprint Of The Year award over on Cross Examining Crime, and because she’s a busy old thing, I’ve volunteered to help out a bit. Today is the day for nominations, and then next Sunday, Kate will host a poll to decide the winner. Once the nominations are in, I’m going to post a summary of all the titles with a bit of detail so everyone has all the info in one place before the poll happens. Because I’m helpful like that…

To recap – there are various rules as to what qualifies, but basically it’s a book that hasn’t been reprinted in an age and that the nominee has read in 2025. So I guess I’d better get round to my nomination.

There are quite a few books that I could mention that are in need of a reprint – there are still 13/16/17 Brian Flynn books left, depending on which ones you count, and Glyn Carr’s Abercrombie Lewker books are in dire need of a reprint. There are plenty of individual titles too – The Piccadilly Murder by Anthony Berkeley, Murder At Friar’s Pardon by Martin Porlock, The Death Of Laurence Vining by Alan Thomas, or even some of the better Carol Carnac books like When The Devil Was Sick. Oh, and Invisible Green by John Sladek, but that’s a little too recent. I think. If not, then I think someone else has blagged that one.

But, apart from When The Devil Was Sick and Invisible Green, I didn’t read those books this year, but I did read one other book that not only qualifies, but is a stand-out candidate for a classic that almost no one knows about – Into Thin Air by Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk.

It’s a mystery concerning the Spook, a villain who committed all sorts of mysterious crimes before being caught, escaping from jail and then dying in a train wreck. When the Spook seems to have returned, his coffin is exhumed. He’s still dead but on his finger is a ring that Dr Klotz, the famed criminologist, has stolen the night before – but the earth around the coffin had not been disturbed for weeks…

Add in a bundle of impossibilities, including a locked room murder, and a clever structural trick where the role of sleuth seems to rotate from character to character. There’s also a lecture – in the same lines as the well-known Locked Room Lecture from Carr’s The Hollow Man or the less well-known Poison Lecture from Carr’s The Black Spectacles – on characters in mystery novels. It’s an interesting read and also predates those other lectures by at least six years.

It’s a novel that has fallen into obscurity, but it’s a great read and an important part of crime fiction history. Hopefully the American Mystery Classics might pick it up – one can only hope. Of course, if you all voted for it, that just might help…

So, stay tuned here, and to Cross Examining Crime, for more on the nominees. And if you’ve got a book that you think qualifies, pop it, with a brief rationale, in the comments below, and if you’re quick enough, we can include it in the poll.