LOS ANGELES — Last summer, while browsing in a used bookstore in San Luis Obispo, Calif., I discovered something I thought no longer existed — an Agatha Christie novel I had not read. Anyone monitoring my vital signs would have thought I had discovered the next Gnostic gospel or a lost play of Shakespeare’s. Clutching it tightly as if someone might snatch it from me, I quickly bought it. I promised myself I would take my time, savor the experience and read only a few pages at a time. Instead, I finished it the next day.

Now it resides beside its sisters in my Agatha box, a crate at the foot of my bed. I don’t own all of the 66 mystery novels and 14 short-story collections that Christie wrote, but I have most of them and I read them over and over again, in rotation, throughout the year.

LOS ANGELES — A baby is snatched by crows. His sister treks into the woods to find him and is followed by one Curtis Mehlberg, “son of Lydia and David, resident of Portland, Ore., comic-book fan boy, persecuted loner.”

Wild adventures ensue.

If the story sounds like modern-day folklore from the band the Decemberists, it is, in a way. The sturm und drang just isn’t set to a catchy blend of the band’s bouzouki and harmonized vocals. It’s the premise of a new book series for middle-grade readers from the Decemberists’ front man, Colin Meloy, and his illustrator wife, Carson Ellis.

We sure have come a long way since Out of Africa and The Flame Trees of Thika.

In the second decade of the 21st century, some of the most compelling contemporary crime-fiction novels are either set in or coming from Africa. Much as Scandinavia became associated with the genre a few years back—thanks in large part to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy—Africa may become a new capital of literary crime.

Cape Town’s Roger Smith, who writes with the brutal beauty of an Elmore Leonard in a very bad mood, is at the forefront. His 2009 debut, Mixed Blood, has been optioned for a film starring Samuel L. Jackson and directed by Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger). His second book, Wake Up Dead, is also going Hollywood, with director Mark Tonderai (Hush) attached.

I’m on a course of children’s literature lately, and have just finished Kate Douglas Wiggin’s celebrated Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Also New Chronicles of Rebecca, which tells additional stories within the timeframe of the original.

There I am, reading along, enjoying the new insights that emerge when you reread a childhood favourite… when it hits me: this all sounds familiar. Very familiar. To wit:

“I think we all have a girl in us,” Eve Ensler told the crowd at the University of Chicago’s International House recently, while speaking about her new book I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World. The evening fluctuated from book reading to performance to rally to consciousness raising session, until it was unclear where one experience began and the other ended. And herein lies the basic issue I have with Ensler’s work; she invariably tries to create a voice for an audience that have their own voices.