The Bookseller.com

6th July 2009

Atlantic lifts classic crime books

30.09.08 Catherine Neilan

Classic crime titles are being given a facelift this autumn with the launch of a new list featuring stylish monochrome artwork from Atlantic Books.

The series will begin on 1st November with a four-strong launch comprising Gerald Griffin’s thriller The Collegians, Sapper’s detective novel Bulldog Drummond, Raffles by E W Hornung and Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which Atlantic describes as "the first detective novel".

Thereafter, the publisher will launch a book every month—including titles by Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sheridan Le Fanu and G K Chesterton—until at least the end of 2009.

Each book will carry original artwork, with a different artist for every title. The B-format paperbacks will retail at £7.99, except Bleak House, which is £8.99.

Toby Mundy, m.d. and publisher at Atlantic, said the decision to launch a series of classic crime novels had been made after the success of the firm’s contemporary crime range. "We’ll do one per month until we run out of ideas," he said, hinting at a "more international approach" to come.

Mundy added the range was designed to "colonise shelf space" and "enhance profitability" for the firm. "We are not paying the authors [because they are out of copyright] so we decided to invest more in packaging," he explained. "I wanted to create a cultural distance between us and Penguin Classics, because I wanted these books to stand on their own two feet as fantastic storytelling—not as historical muesli."

Print runs will differ for each book, but Mundy said the first four books would have worldwide runs of roughly 10,000.

He explained the inclusion of Bleak House was to "grab people’s attention" and to demonstrate the "strong editorial point of view" within the series, adding that Dickens’ character Detective Bucket was "the prototype for many detective novels".

Rather than an introduction, each of the books will feature "case notes" by series adviser Robert Giddings, looking at the world each book inhabited and the contemporary response to its publication.

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