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BOOK NEWS During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens and Jack London created dozens of characters in their many works of fiction. Now, 21st-century authors are show-ing those classic writers the view from the other side of the page by casting them as characters in three new volumes of mystery fiction. Also among the latest hardcover volumes of mystery and suspense fiction are books featuring the exploits of other well-known characters – Bos-ton private-eye Spenser, archaeologist Amelia Peabody and bookseller-burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr – who have lived only on the printed page. Andrew Taylor’s "An Unpardonable Crime’’ (Hyperion) is set during the five years in which the American-born Poe attended boarding school in Eng-land. Thomas Shield, Poe’s teacher, stumbles upon evidence of embezzlement and murder in a story that also incorporates two real-life mysteries: the disappearance of Poe’s birth father and Poe’s disappearance just before his death in 1849. Dickens’ works inspired the 11 stories in "Death by Dickens’’ (Berkley), edited by Anne Perry. Sidney Carton, Samuel Pickwick, Miss Havisham and Pip, and a computer-age Scrooge are the Dickens characters resurrected in new tales by Perry, Carole Nelson Douglas, Bill Crider and others. Dickens does some detecting, too, when a well-dressed corpse washes ashore on the banks of the Thames in Peter Tre-mayne’s story "The Passing Shadow.’’ London visits London — that is, Jack London visits London, England — in "Death in Hyde Park’’ (Berkley) by Robin Paige. In 1902, on Coronation Day for King Edward VII, an anarchist accidentally kills himself with a bomb intended for the new monarch. The investigation is complicated when London, the visiting American writer, becomes romantically involved with a journalist for whom the anarchist worked. Kinky Friedman doesn’t have to wait 100 years for some other novelist to cast him in a whodunit. He’s been doing it himself. "The Prisoner of Vandam Street’’ (Simon & Schuster) is the latest in Friedman’s series in which he appears as a private eye. In this installment, the ailing Friedman, homebound in his New York loft, looks out the window and sees a violent crime being committed in an apartment across the street. Police are summoned, but find no trace of a crime — nor of the apartment in which it was supposedly committed. Robert B. Parker’s "Spenser’’ novels have done good business. In "Bad Business’’ (Putnam), 31st in the series, a woman hires Spenser to trail her husband, whom she suspects is cheating on her. Spenser soon discovers that not only is the man cheating, he has someone trailing his wife. Things get more serious when the two-timing husband, CFO of an energy company, is found shot to death in his office. Books and crooks mix again in "The Burglar on the Prowl’’ (Morrow), Lawrence Block’s 10th novel featuring Rhodenbarr, the respectable New York dealer of antiquarian books who dabbles as a spare-time burglar. On a practice run for an upcoming break-in, he’s relieving an apartment of its portable assets when the resident and a companion unexpectedly return. Trap-ped, Rhodenbarr hides under the bed, where he becomes ear-witness to a violent crime being committed directly above him. On the East Coast, Boston private eye Carlotta Carlyle agrees to help a Harvard professor who is being blackmailed in "Deep Pockets’’ (St. Martin’s), 10th in Linda Barnes’ series. On the West Coast, a series of violent crimes in San Francisco are investigated by the Women’s Murder Club in "3rd Degree’’ (Little, Brown), third in the series by James Patterson and Andrew Gross. And between the coasts is the setting for "Arch Angels’’ (Thomas Dunne), Robert J. Randisi’s story about a series of murders whose victims – young boys in Chicago and young girls in St. Louis – are strangled. In Ed Gorman’s "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’’ (Carroll & Graf), an Iowan private eye investigates a murder with four suspects – all prominent members of the community – during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. In Depression-era East Texas, a woman shoots her abusive husband in self-defense and assumes his duties as constable of her small town in "Sun-set and Sawdust’’ (Knopf) by Joe R. Lansdale.
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