Hildegarde Withers--Uncollected Stories

Also lending a nostalgic view of an earlier New York, here the 1930s and featuring a schoolmarm sleuth, is Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles, another entry in Crippen & Landru's Lost Classics series. Available as well are two other original story collections: The Sleuth of Baghdad: The Inspector Chafik Stories, by Charles B. Child (the pseudonym of British author Claude Vernon Frost), whose hero provides some timely insight into Iraqi culture and politics ($27 196p ISBN 1-885941-74-9; $17 paper -75-7), and Georges Simenon's The 13 Culprits: (Les 13 Coupables), translated by Peter Schulman, which gathers 13 pre-Maigret tales never before published in English ($35 174p ISBN 1-885941-78-1; $16 paper -79-X).