My time for the Mystery*File blog will be restricted over the next few weeks, if not for most of the summer, but have no fear. I’m not going away. I have a large archive of book reviews to choose from, many of which have never been published anywhere else, until now. You’ll be seeing them soon.

   I also have loads of reviews I did starting back in the 1970s, when they were appearing in both The Mystery FANcier and the Hartford Courant, and (without looking too closely at them yet) I see no reason why I shouldn’t start posting them here too.

   You’ll already have noticed the greater frequency of reviews in the past week or so. Most of them have already been written, and the time it takes to get them posted is comparatively minimal. While there’ll always be a steady amount of current mystery fiction that I’ll continue cover, along with the older books and authors, there are any number of mystery-oriented blogs which primarily review and discuss only what’s new and recent. There aren’t as many of them that talk about older books and authors with any degree of regularity, and then within their own selected limits. Maybe I’m simply finding my own niche.

   A recent post was called The Compleat INIGO JONES, which I hope you saw, but if not you can always go back and take a look. It’s a format that I like and I think is workable without taking a lot of effort, especially for authors who wrote only a small handful of books before ending their careers, for whatever reason.

   If I continue, and I think I will, this series of such short profiles will not be restricted to unknown writers of the 1940s. I’ll cover the gamut. There’s no reason why unknown writers of the 2000s can’t be included, too. Can it really be over seven years since everyone was worried about Y2K? That’s plenty of time for a mystery writer to have come along, produced three or four good books, and then have disappeared again without too much notice — and more crucially, without a contract for more.

   I’ll also stay busy working on the online Addenda for Al Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV and uploading covers to the online Supplement to Bill Deeck’s Murder at 3c a Day.

   So — without making promises I cannot keep — this is what I will be doing this summer, along with cataloguing and organizing my own collection. I know, I say this every year, but this time I mean it.