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King and Joker
Peter Dickinson
#UB4252
Paperback, 238 pages; 2006 (1976)
$8.90
A Mysterious Small Press…
In 1994, Maggie Topkis and four friends opened Partners & Crime—a mystery bookstore in New York's Greenwich Village—because they loved introducing customers to little-known gems in the genre. But increasingly, those gems were disappearing as publishers took titles out of print. So, Topkis decided to save her favorite mysteries from extinction and in 1995 she launched Felony & Mayhem Press. How does she choose what to publish? "We always start with the writing," she says. "Is it intelligent? Is it witty? Is it the voice of an author with whom you want to spend time? Most newly published mysteries are plot-driven—the characters get moved through the story like pieces on a chessboard. I know there are readers who are looking for a richer experience than that. And at Felony & Mayhem, we hope to provide it."
Bas Bleu is proud to offer six Felony & Mayhem titles that Maggie Topkis has selected especially for our readers. Read her recommendations, below, and you'll want all six!
For many of today's best mystery writers, Peter Dickinson is almost a demigod; his books are so extraordinary, and so unlike both each other and anything else, that they entirely transcend the mystery genre. In King and Joker, the imaginary King Victor II and his family (including the hairy, vegetarian Prince of Wales) live in Buckingham Palace, but the simultaneous joke and meat of the book are the extent to which they are really just an ordinary middle-class 1980s household forced to exist in rather extraordinary circumstances. The book is narrated by the teenage Princess Louise, whose ancient nurse, keeper of generations of royal secrets, is now dying in a suite upstairs. The delicacy of the interaction between the nurse and Louise, the last child she will launch into adulthood, is just exquisite: the ending always makes me cry.
(MT)
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