Favorite Mysteries: Old Crimes

I love the mystery subgenre where a detective looks back and tries to solve a historical crime. The classic in this area is The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, where Grant Allen, stuck in a hospital bed recovering from a broken leg, distracts himself by investigating the mystery of the Princes in the Tower.

Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse had his own stay in the hospital in The Wench Is Dead, where he looked into a 19th-century murder on the river.

Agatha Christie tried her hand at this kind of mystery, too, in Elephants Can Remember and Five Little Pigs.

Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini collaborated on Beyond the Grave, where Muller's character Elena Oliverez looks into a mystery first investigated in 1894 by Pronzini's PI character Quincannon.

Lee Harris has written a whole series in this subgenre, where former nun Christine Bennett is an amateur detective looking into old mysteries.