Summer is just about gone, the kids are going back to school and students are returning to college or university. As the leaves will soon turn to yellow, like the pages in a favourite old novel, isn’t it the perfect time to get back to some old school crime fiction? We think so, and for quite a while we’ve been planning a special themed month for you. Welcome to Classics in September, supported by Open Road Integrated Media.

Over the coming 30 days, whenever you see CIS in the headline, and the special banner we had made above a story, you’ll know it’s part of our classic theme.

The term classic is bandied about a lot. Sometimes you’ll see a recently released book being sold as ‘an instant classic’. Here, however, we’re going to get into some great crime fiction reading from years gone by. Books that we believe have stood the test of time. Each of our writers has focused on areas of the genre that interest them most, and we haven’t tried to apply an academic approach to what defines a classic. We’ll be talking about Golden Age novels that are finding new audiences via ebook formats, as well as the more pulp-tastic regions of the genre such as noir and hardboiled. We’ll touch on famous sleuths like Holmes and Simenon, and top authors from Thompson to Ellroy.

And we plan to talk to several experts – watch for our interviews with Otto Penzler of Mysterious Press, and Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime. They’re both award-winning authors and they both run publishing companies that are making reprinting and releasing digital versions of books by great crime authors from years ago. Barry Forshaw, a British authority on crime fiction, will be on hand too with some of his favourites. Oh, and watch for the chance to win some great throwback novels later in the month.

First off, we’re going to head over to Sweden to find out where it all started for Nordic Noir by revisiting the classic Martin Beck novel Roseanna, by Maj Sjӧwall and Per Wahlӧӧ.