J. Kingston Pierce is both the editor of the award-winning crime-fiction blog
The Rap Sheet and the senior editor of
January Magazine.
For his column as
Kirkus Reviews’ lead blogger in the Mysteries and Thrillers category, he came up with
five of the best and most interesting historical crime novelists, including:
Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Prior to his death in 2009, Kaminsky produced four different detective series. The best of them starred midnight Toby Peters (né Pevsner), a disheveled, divorced and taco-loving ex-security officer with Warner Bros. in Hollywood, who had been fired in 
1936 (after “breaking the arm of a Western star who had made the mistake of thinking he was as tough in person as he was on the screen”) and subsequently re-created himself as the most low-rent of private eyes, working for a succession of early 1940s celebrities. In You Bet Your Life (1978), he’s hired to help the outrageously funny Marx Brothers out of a money jam with mobsters, while in A Few Minutes Past Midnight (2001) he tries to protect Charlie Chaplin from someone threatening to kill the Little Tramp over his latest film project.
Read about
another novelist on the list.
Also see:
David B. Rivkin, Jr's five best historical mystery novels and
Randy Dotinga's top five historical true-crime books of the last decade.
--Marshal Zeringue
