So, it’s time for the Reprint Of The Year awards. For the next two weeks, I’m going to nominate two classic crime novels that were reprinted this year in order for you to vote for them to win the award. Of course some of my fellow bloggers will nominate books too, but you don’t want to vote for them, do you?

No, you want to vote for Brian Fly… checks… oh, there weren’t any Brian Flynn reprints this year. OK, well there are other authors to consider…

And let’s start with Christianna Brand. The British Library has done stellar work reprinting so many classic crime writers and bringing them into the public awareness, but the one thing that always disappoints me, as a completist, that there are some authors who we’re never going to see a complete back catalogue for. E C R Lorac, for example – at one book every six months, I’m not sure I’m going to be around for the complete set of those.

However Christianna Brand is a different kettle of fish. There aren’t that many titles and in recent years, the British Library has been doing a good job of working through them. We’re still missing the opening two titles – Death In High Heels and Heads You Lose – but when Cat and Mouse is released next year, we will have a continuous run of six of her books, and this year filled in an important gap – Brand’s tour de force, namely Tour De Force.

A lot of people will cite Green For Danger or Death Of Jezebel as her best book – they’d be close, as they’re both fantastic mysteries,  but they’d also be wrong.

Tour De Force features Inspector Cockrill making the sleuth’s mistake of taking a holiday. It takes its time to set up the suspects and the motivations, and eschews any impossible crime, bar the fact that nobody could have committed the crime because Cockrill was observing them all when it happened. The characters are fully formed and Brand works her trick of multiple fake endings very well. The overall trick is, as I described it when I reviewed it a few years ago, “an impressive deception.”

Definitely a book that needed reprinting and I do hope it doesn’t go under the radar – it doesn’t get the trumpeting of Death Of Jezebel, due to the long unavailability of that one, but as I said, I think it’s Brand’s finest work. Hopefully you will too.

So, if you want to vote for this in the Reprint Of The Year awards, then head over to Cross Examining Crime in a week or so – the full details are here. And if you absolutely must look at other people’s choices, then why not check out these blogs later on today…

• Aidan – Mysteries Ahoy
• Bev – My Reader’s Block
• Brad – Ah Sweet Mystery Blog
• Hayley – Desperate Reader
• Janet – From First Page To Last
• Mallika – Literary Potpourri
• Kate – Cross Examining Crime
• Moira – Clothes in Books
• Neeru – A Hot Cup of Pleasure