Looking for a good mystery? Here are some suggestions

Cold outside? What better time for a good old-fashioned mystery? Even if you’re snowed in for the holidays — or all of January, for that matter — these collections will keep you cozy. edited by Martin Edwards (British Library Crime Classics/Poisoned Pen Press). Who can resist a story that begins: “I shall never forget the terrible Christmas I spent at Ringshaw Grange in the year ’93.” Note that’s 1893, which is the proper time for a vintage whodunit such as Fergus Hume’s “The Ghost’s Touch.” In this imaginative anthology, Edwards — president of Britain’s Detection Club — has gathered together overlooked criminous gems by such old pros as Edgar Wallace, Margery Allingham, Julian Symons and Michael Gilbert, to name only the most famous. Fans of the world’s first consulting detective won’t want to miss “Christmas Eve,” a short play by S.C. Roberts in which the winsome Violet de Vinne consults Holmes — and a smitten Watson — about the theft of Lady Barton’s pearls.

edited by Christopher Redmond (Wildside). Speaking of Sherlock, here are essays, mainly by younger devotees of the great detective, on all 60 of his canonical cases. Most readers would pick “The Speckled Band,” “Silver Blaze” or “The Hound of the Baskervilles” as showing Holmes at the top of his form, but Redmond — a leading Canadian scholar of the canon — has asked his contributors to argue the superlative merits of each and every one of the stories, including such notorious clinkers as “The Sussex Vampire” and “The Blanched Soldier.” The deductive logic brought to bear by the various essayists would certainly earn the admiration of Holmes himself.

by Frederick Irving Anderson; edited by Benjamin F. Fisher (Crippen & Landru). Connoisseurs of classic crime know Anderson as the creator of two legendary con artists whose exploits were consolidated in “Adventures of the Infallible Godahl” (1914) and “The Notorious Sophie Lang” (1925). But, as editor Fisher reminds us, Anderson contributed many additional stories to the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines in the 1920s and ’30s, several featuring Oliver Armiston, a former — his word is “extinct” — writer of detective stories, and Deputy Parr. In “The Phantom Alibi,” for example, we learn that Armiston — who resembles a fat Buddha — abandoned writing because one of his complicated thriller plots was copied in real life, “not even eliding the murder.” But now Parr asks Armiston to use his novelistic ingenuity to clear a scientist of a gruesome homicide, though all the physical evidence points to the man’s guilt. After being presented with the facts, Armiston turns to his oracle — the typewriter. Somehow his fingers on the keyboard stir his thought processes and — in a Eureka moment — he sees the true meaning of the crime and how it was committed. edited by Martin Edwards (Crippen & Landru). This tribute anthology — honoring one of our best detective story writers on his 80th birthday — is worth acquiring just for its extras: a foreword by Len Deighton, Lovesey’s own reminiscences of the Detection Club in the 1970s and the anecdotal introductory notes to the 20 new stories, which include Andrew Taylor’s delightful “The False Inspector Lovesey,” a bit of literary homage that neatly mixes double-cross, swindle and an orphaned housemaid’s dreams.

by Max Rittenberg (Coachwhip). Until I read Mike Ashley’s introduction to this collection of stories, all of them published between 1913 and 1915, I had never heard of Magnum, a “scientific consultant” with just a single name, “like a peer or a prince.” In appearance and personality, Magnum resembles an amalgam of Conan Doyle’s two most famous characters, the imperious Sherlock and the choleric Professor George Edward Challenger (from “The Lost World”). But Rittenberg’s detective employs the most up-to-date advances in Edwardian-era science, rather like his exact contemporary, R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke. Superbly eccentric, Magnum lives up the Thames at Plumstead Marshes and travels to his laboratories via a high-powered motor launch named “Fifi.” In the title story, “The Invisible Bullet,” Magnum finds himself confronted with a classic impossible crime: A man is shot twice at point-blank range in a gymnasium, but no one is seen to leave the murder scene. Neither the gun nor one of the spent bullets can be found — but in this latter fact lies the key to the whole mystery. by Thomas Mann (BearManor). Tod Browning’s “London After Midnight” is a legendary, and now lost, silentera mystery, its last known print having been destroyed in an MGM vault fire in 1967. But scholar-detective Tom Mann recently unearthed an 11,000word fictionalization of the movie, which he uses here — in conjunction with a few surviving stills — to re-create the plot and action of this Lon Chaney masterpiece. Mystery and film buffs will rejoice. edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger (Pegasus). Comprising contributions by David Morrell, Cory Doctorow, Anne Perry and many others equally well known, this is the third in an anthology series of “stories inspired by the Holmes canon.” The previous installment, “In the Company of Sherlock Holmes,” won several awards (and — full disclosure — featured a bit of whimsy by myself ). Among the highlights in this new volume are “Mrs. Hudson Investigates,” told in graphic-novel form by Tony Lee and Bevis Musson, and John Connolly’s metafictional “Holmes on the Range: A Tale of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository.” In this story, Moriarty formulates an elaborate jewel heist requiring — the ingenious fiend! — “six dwarfs, a bald man with a stoop, and an airship.”