Before Agatha Christie became the world’s Queen of Crime, she stood on the talented shoulders of the female crime authors who came before her. This splendid new anthology by Leslie S. Klinger brings these exceptional writers out of Christie’s shadow and back into the spotlight they deserve.
Agatha Christie is undoubtedly the world’s best-selling mystery author, hailed as the “Queen of Crime,” with worldwide sales in the billions. Christie burst onto the literary scene in 1920, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles; her last novel was published in 1976, a career longer than even Conan Doyle’s forty-year span.
The truth is that it was due to the success of writers like Anna Katherine Green in America; L. T. Meade, C. L. Pirkis, the Baroness Orczy, and Elizabeth Corbett in England; and Mary Fortune in Australia that the doors were finally opened for women crime-writers. Authors who followed them, such as Patricia Wentworth, Dorothy Sayers, and, of course, Agatha Christie would not have thrived without the bold, fearless work of their predecessors—and the genre would be much poorer for their absence. So while Agatha Christie may still reign supreme, it is important to remember that she did not ascend that throne except on the shoulders of the women who came before her—and inspired her—and who are now removed from her shadow once and for all by this superb new anthology by Leslie S. Klinger.
Russian rights to Yoon Ha Lee’s Hugo- and Nebula-nominated NINEFOX GAMBIT, to Eksmo, by Igor Korzhenevski at Alexander Korzhenevski Agency in association with Jennifer Jackson and Michael Curry.
DMLA congratulates Nnedi Okorafor for Akata Warrior being listed one of New York Time’s Notable Children’s Books of 2017!
Washington Post: With over 200 color and black-and-white illustrations, six appendixes and nearly 1,000 annotations, this edition of “Frankenstein” is a cornucopia of background information … Klinger’s edition allows readers to understand the complexities of the novel as well as the difficulties endured by its author. 
From the Edgar Award winning annotator Leslie S. Klinger (The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes), a volume of five classic crime novels of the 1920’s, with annotations and illustrations in a deluxe edition, to Claiborne Hancock at Pegasus Books, via Donald Maass.
Audio rights to World Fantasy, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor’s AKATA WITCH, to Hayley Marshall at Tantor Audio, at auction, in a three-book deal, by Katie Shea Boutillier.