Crossover Cover: Beyond the Grave

 

In April 1894, John Quincannon, Sabina Carpenter’s partner in the San Francisco-based firm Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, is hired by Felipe Velasquez to find a treasure chest containing valuable religious icons that Velasquez’ father had a priest bury in 1846, during the Bear Flag Revolution. Unfortunately, he fails in his task. In 1986, Elena Oliverez, director of the Museum of Mexican Art in Santa Barbara, wins a marriage coffer in an auction that contains Quincannon’s notes on the case. Elena faces danger as she tries to find the treasure herself. Elena Oliverez previously appeared in Muller’s novels The Tree of Death and The Legend of the Slain Soldiers, as well as the short story “The Sanchez Sacraments.” Muller and Pronzini’s Carpenter and Quincannon mysteries are in the CU through a crossover with Sherlock Holmes, so this novel brings in Elena Oliverez.

This crossover is one of hundreds covered in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3! Like the first two volumes, this one is an AUTHORIZED companion to Win Scott Eckert's astounding Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2 and will be published by Meteor House!

Crossover Cover: The Cana Diversion

Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's novel Double is a team-up between Pronzini's Nameless Detective and Muller's P.I. Sharon McCone, who meet at a convention in San Diego. Also attending the convention are Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, Robert J. Randisi's Miles Jacoby, and William Campbell Gault's Brock "The Rock" Callahan. In Gault's The Cana Diversion, Callahan investigates the death of his friend and fellow P.I. Joe Puma, who appeared in his own series of novels by Gault from 1953 to 1961.

Crossover Cover: The Bughouse Affair

This book is an expanded version of Pronzini's story "The Bughouse Caper," in which his and his wife Marcia Muller's 19th century American detectives John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter encounter Sherlock Holmes during the Great Hiatus. Holmes also appears in the Quincannon and Carpenter novel following this one, The Spook Lights Affair. Quincannon and Carpenter's second published appearance was in Muller and Pronzini's book Beyond the Grave, which had a framing sequence involving the manuscript of the case being discovered by Elena Oliverez, curator at the Museum of Mexican Arts in Santa Barbara. Prior to Beyond the Grave, Elena was the protagonist of two other novels by Muller, The Tree of Death and The Legend of the Slain Soldiers, which therefore also take place in the Crossover Universe. Win included "The Bughouse Caper" in Volume 1, and I'm planning to read The Spook Lights Affair and Beyond the Grave so that I can include them in the new volumes.