The novels in the Black Spring Crime Series—many of them their authors’ debuts—push the boundaries of genre and illuminate the expressive power of the genre’s bounds in the process. They foreground survivors and outsiders, antiheroes and unreliable narrators. Luca Veste writes in his new foreword to one of the editions that it’s “like nothing you’ve read before.”
When we met with the Black Spring Press Group team at London Book Fair in 2023, the meeting already had a sense of gravitas and excitement for what was to come. (It might help that we followed up for coffee in Maida Vale, where Black Spring Press’s office is located and where editor and owner Dr. Todd Swift had met with great authors and editors over the years.)
The Alexandria team was an unusual presence at London Book Fair that year: we were seeking collaborators as well as customers, looking to understand how best to demarcate and present an entirely new format to publishers and readers alike. Since then, we’ve developed and released our publisher platform, designed to allow publishers to upload their catalogues and configure new collectible digital editions.
Black Spring Press is no stranger to innovation in form, and they have been a delightful collaborator for us as we laid the foundations of our digital Library of Alexandria this past year. We’re inspired by their important important work in preserving, reviving, and even resurrecting genre-defining literature and bringing it to new audiences, such as Neal Cassady’s previously lost The Joan Anderson Letter.
“Progression is exciting. Always,” writes Clare Grant in the foreword to the new digital edition of her historical thriller Winter of Shadows. We are grateful to the authors for putting these works into the world and placing their faith in our Alexandria to steward them into digital; to Dr. Todd Swift, Amira Ghanim, and the Black Spring Press Group team for publishing these books and collaborating with us to create new paradigms for digital; to Luca Veste for his curation and appreciation of great new crime fiction; to the authors including Lee Child, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Mark Billingham, titans of the thriller genre who have supported these new works.
J.K. Nottingham’s Jasper’s Brood is out now, a harsh winter story of an assassin who was raised and trained by his parents’ killer, and who has since raised a “family” of his own. This week, we’ll release Winter of Shadows, a mystery taking place in Victorian England led by the country’s one and only crime scene photographer, Ada Fawkes, as she grapples with the dark challenges of her profession in order to stop a dangerous killer. Next week, we’ll release A Crime in the Land of 7,000 Islands, a tale of criminal justice, generational trauma, and exploitation, through the lens of a fantastical allegory with which the Special Agent at the story’s center shares these painful truths with her young daughter.
We invite readers to curate their own personal libraries in the digital Alexandria with these stories. We celebrate each novel with new exclusive forewords and original covers. We look forward to bringing the rest of the Crime Series onto the platform in the coming months. In the meantime, we continue to onboard collaborators in building this archive and securing more great work, new and old, in our forever library.
