About This Issue

THE SUMMER 2026 EDITION

Summer’s here and the time is right?

I dunno. Like a lot of you, I feel a growing uneasiness, like I’m getting too old for this shit. Politics, the weather, disasters near and far, war (what is it good for, really?), the increasing boorishness of people we used to expect at least a basic level of honesty and common decency from, be it coworkers or political leaders.

But as always, detectives fiction comes through to soothe me, the literary equivalent of Dobie Gray’s Drift Away.

The cover? The summer seems like a good time to recycle an old crime comic cover, full of bright, bold colors — the perfect complement to cold beer, sunshine, something tasty cooking on the grill and maybe an occasional  dip in a cool, refreshing body of water.

I swiped it from the cover of Detective Picture Stories #3, which came out in 1937… almost 90 years ago! Detective Picture Stories was a short-lived (only five issues!) comic anthology, but its name will go down in infamy as the first-ever comic book to devote itself entirely to detective stories, featuring a motley crew of police officers, government agents, amateur sleuths and, yes, private eyes. Still, this early crime mag beat DC’s Detective Comics to the punch by over a year. The original cover was by J. R. Wilcox.  It’s no lost classic, as covers go, but its pure, uncluttered simplicity just struck me. And the cheesy little gumshoe loitering in the “D” amused me.

Hopefully a few new goodies I’ve lined up for this “issue” will likewise amuse you.

PI author Stephen G. Eoannou (the Nicholas Bishop mysteries) serves up a tasty overview of seven modern “defective detectives” in Driven by Disability, while another newish member of the Shamus Game, Nick Kolakowski, (the Dash Fuller series) has an opinion or two on the second season of the controversial AppleTV+ detective drama  Sugar, suggesting its return might be because we did something bad in a past life.

Ouch!

Also recently added to the site is a handful of reviews, new to this site. John Larsen looks at Crime Scenes, a new collection on by Joseph S. Walker, while Aubrey Hamilton has generously allowed us to rerun a trio of retro reviews from her Happiness is a Book. This issue, she looks at  Shackled by Bill Pronzini, The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker, and The Suicide Murders by Howard Engel (Hey, I had to work some Canadian content in here somehow, and if Engel’s Benny Cooperman was anymore Canadian he’d have been marinated in maple syrup and served on a hockey puck.

Yes, there are oh-so-many old reviews I still have to re-add to the site, but please, if you happen to have an opinion or two and fancy yourself a “Budding Boucher,” and you’d like to share a review or  two with us, don’t be shy. I’m always looking for new content here.

Just don’t forget The Ten Commandments of Book Reviewing.

#ElbowsUp
#CourageOurWord

Kevin Burton Smith
Editor/Founder