The Return of Theodore Terhune – and Book Giveaway!

I was delighted to go to my lobby and retrieve a pile of packages yesterday, including one big box from Moonstone Press. Inside were five copies of the latest Bruce Graeme books they have reprinted. And now it's time for me to announce a secret I’ve (almost) kept to myself for over a year. Seven of the eight Theodore Terhune mystery novels are slated for reprinting and all of them will be released at scattered months throughout 2021! Moonstone is releasing them in chronological order so you can read the books as they were first published back in the 1940s and 1950s. The first two pictured here have been out since last month and are available in both digital and paperback versions.  Some good news for US readers who prefer physical printed books is that Amazon in the US can do a POD of the book so you don't have to wait for one to be shipped from the UK.

Another bonus: the Terhune series consist entirely of bibliomysteries, a subgenre of detective novels about books and book collecting. Each mystery novel is chockful of intriguing details and lore touching on all aspects of bibliomania including, in one later book, the arcane world of book auctions.

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I reviewed Seven Clues in Search of a Crime, the first of the Theodore Terhune books, two years ago. Several comments on that post lamented that the book was impossible to find due to its scarcity and were hoping for a reprint. Voila! Sometimes your wishes come true, my friends. You just need a little patience.

I have been hired to write introductions to all of the books so you’ll get some interesting detective fiction history on how each book fits into the history of the development of the genre, as gaining insight to Graeme’s favorite themes and genre conventions. The publisher of Moonstone Press put me in touch with Graeme’s granddaughter and I was able to get some interesting anecdotes about her memories of him and bits of her emails to me have been included in the biographical section of the intro that appears in House with the Crooked Walls. He was quite a character!

To celebrate this exciting news of more Bruce Graeme books now readily available to the eager devotees of Golden Age of Detective Fiction I’m offering a copy of each of the two newly released books, Seven Clues in Search of a Crime and the equally impossible to find title House with Crooked Walls, to one lucky reader of this blog post.

RULES:

1. Open only to those who live in USA, Canada or UK. (If you live in the EU or somewhere on the Asian continent I hope you have a friend who will accept the package for you in one of the three eligible countries.)
2. Leave a comment below and tell me the title of your favorite bibliomystery.
3. After one week I will assign entries a number then randomly select one of those numbers through an entirely unorthodox but failproof method that has nothing to do with the internet.
4. Winners will be announced here on March 24.

Good luck to all those who enter!