Strange Cases: A Selective Guide to Speculative Mystery Fiction

What at first sounds like a marginal genre of fiction – the hybrid of mystery novels and “speculative fiction”, or stories about alternate worlds and societies – is actually very trendy and widely read. Vampires in particular have become more of a mainstream subject with the recent popularity of television series like True Blood and the Twilight films, both based on novels. Both genres contain a variety of style and content – science fiction, time travel and parallel universes, ghosts, vampires and aliens in “spec. fic.” and the cosies, whodunits, and police procedurals of mysteries – that fuel the imaginations...