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Bookish: BREAKTHROUGH DETECTING (3#) -

Barkeep pens winner, bedouin sleuth,
and prototype crime solver . . .

An outstanding article about Police Officer Jack Whicher
who helped establish the first modern Detective Bureau:

"The prince of detectives," as a colleague described him, Inspector Jonathan Whicher was one of the founding members of the first detective force in the English-speaking world... He and his colleagues had few precedents to guide them: they made up their methods on the hoof... Whicher had a literary afterlife... leaving the pages of the press to reappear in the pages of fiction.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale has been published by Bloomsbury. And it is the BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week this week. [guard]

# Middle East Mystery: a literary foray into the tense passions simmering just under the radar in modern-day Jeddah written by an author who has lived in the area:

The lifeless body of Nouf, daughter of a wealthy family, is found out in the desert after an apparent kidnapping. Nayir, a desert tracker, is called upon to become the Private Eye to investigate the situation.

This novel is said to capture both the glitzy modernities of Saudi Arabia together with the social constraints which are widely customary there and the dynamic tensions between these two cultural currents.

The Night of the Mi'raj by Zoe Ferraris
:: is reviewed by Lucy Beresford.

# Now, here is the kind of news
one wants to wake up to on Monday morning:

A New Orleans bartender is the winner of the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Bill Loehfelm is the author of a noir mystery set in lower-middle-class Staten Island: Fresh Kills. He won a $25,000 publishing contract with Penguin, which will publish the novel in late summer.

...