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Hello, today we've a full line-up of imaginative blasts from the past.

The Bob Dylan of literature. We uncover an unsung hero of the American Midwest.

Last year's sawaway festive hit, Mystery and White, created an appetite for

similar vintage Christmas-focused crime. We're onto it. And I suspect to the delight of many

Scottish schoolchildren, the epic sunset song has been adapted for the big screen. We explore

what readers will miss if they opt for the bite-sized two-hour

Cini version and how two authors have found their voices in the animal kingdom.

You know, the view on the human in 15 dogs is so odd that I think you can see our own

behavior through a lens that makes our behavior very funny.

Terrifying thought. More on that later. But first to an author who's been described as the greatest writer you've never heard of.

Thankfully, with the re-release of Tom Drury's series of Blackly Comic and Unsettling novels based in America's Midwest,

and including his Grouse County trilogy, that's about to change.

His 1994 debut, The End of Vandalism, set the standard pretty high

when the arrest of a criminal called Tiny for vandalising an anti-vandalism dance

creates an unlikely menager-tois.

A similar cast of sheriffs and small-town crooks, drifters and secretive loners

are also to be found in the driftless area, republished this month.

The title refers to an area of the US that the glaciers parted to avoid,

a perfect metaphor for this rugged, undulating, forest-clad

backwater. In the novel, one event leads inexorably to another. Tragedy lurks in the shadows,

and the truth in even stranger places, as Pierre Hunter, an orphaned young bartender discovers

...