Thursday, November 20, 2014

Medora Field's Who Killed Aunt Maggie (1939) and Blood on Her Shoe (1942) Are Back in Print

Anyone following this blog regularly knows I have written a good bit about American women mystery suspense writers of the 1930s, often termed "Rinehart school," after the mysteries of the hugely popular author Mary Roberts Rinehart.  Medora Field, an Atlanta, Georgia journalist and good friend of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, was considered one of the better Rinehart school suspense authors of that era, though she only published two mysteries, at the tail-end of the Golden Age, Who Killed Aunt Maggie? and Blood on Her Shoe.

These novels were well-reviewed and very successful in their day, though there were detractors of the Rinehart school, who dismissed it as the HIBK (Had-I-But-Known ) school.  Personally I've increasingly come to see the merits of this style of mystery writing over the a last few years.  I enjoyed both of Field's two mysteries and I wrote a 5000-word introduction about the novels and the author for the new editions published by Coachwhip (they also have reprinted Anita Blackmon).  I think these are quite attractive book designs. The books should be available in about a week.  Both essentially are American versions of the classic country house party mystery, with quite a bit of "domestic suspense."


3 comments:

  1. Great news!

    So I understand the novels are being published as two separate volumes rather than (as I previously thought) a double volume?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yup, I think it was decided they were a bit long to go into one volume. The two together would have been over 150,000 words.

    I really do like those covers though. I think they are more memorable than the Anita Blackmons, though I enjoyed the Blackmon books too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the info. Yes, the covers are excellent -- especially the second (although with my grizzled old publisher hat on I'd say the title lettering on it is a bit too small . . .).

    ReplyDelete