A recent column was devoted to some of the big, best-selling mystery novels of the fall season. Other books, however, that may not have quite the same print runs or promotion budgets also are extremely worthy — not merely good, but good enough to linger in one’s memory.

Sean Doolittle is one of the bright stars among the galaxy of talented young authors who write with style and authority. His new novel comes showered with enthusiastic quotes from such superstars in that same galaxy as Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, James Lee Burke, Laura Lippman, and Michael Connelly, among others. That much praise gives one the sense that if anyone just now discovering Mr. Doolittle doesn’t like the book, the fault is not the author’s but the reader’s. Having just finished “The Cleanup” (Dell, 304 pages, $6.99), I’d have to concur.

“The Cleanup” is not actually a novel. It’s the perfect noir movie without sound or pictures.

Matthew Worth is a cop who messed up his career and now is on night duty at an Omaha supermarket, helping to bag groceries. That’s not all he messed up. His marriage of 10 years has gyred down the toilet, for which he gets the credit. He is more than a little surprised to now find himself attracted to Gwen, a shy clerk whose gray eyes and slim figure cause him to have late-night fantasies.

Gwen’s worthless boyfriend has abused her and, when the abuse escalates, she deals with it by smashing his head with a handy lamp, so hard and so repeatedly that the face on his dead body is a still life of blood and bone.

As in all classic films noir, the protagonists come to a crossroads at which they inevitably make a decision that cannot possibly take them down the best possible road. In this case, that brilliant notion is that it would be better to cover up the killing than to report it as self-defense.

Mr. Doolittle could only have decided on this particular title as a paean to irony. In the runaway freight train that is the plot, nothing and no one is clean.

A bit of an oddity is “Mystery Muses” (Crum Creek Press, 212 pages, $15.00), edited by Jim Huang and Austin Lugar. The entire book is devoted to the ubiquitous question asked in every interview with a mystery writer: Was there a mystery story that influenced you to become a writer or to write the way you do today? One hundred crime writers answer in these pages.

The publishing house has for many years published the most intelligent mystery fan magazine in the world, “The Drood Review of Mystery,” as well as several reference books, notably “100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century,” for which members of the crime-writing community wrote essays on their favorite books, and “They Died in Vain: Overlooked, Underappreciated, and Forgotten Mystery Novels,” the title of which is self-explanatory and again called on the expertise, or at least the opinion, of mystery writers and editors. Crum Creek Press also brings out paperback reprints of mysteries that have gone out of print.

Since the reprints are on the cozy side of the aisle, reflecting the taste of the good folks who run this little press, it should be no surprise that most of the authors in “Mystery Muses” would generally be more likely to have a box of Friskies in their shopping bag than a .45 Magnum.

Furthermore, it will come as no heart-stopping revelation that the great influences tended to be heavily weighted with Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and such other giants of the Golden Age as Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, and Ellery Queen.

More interesting is to find the übercozy Nancy Pickard being influenced by James M. Cain’s hard-boiled “Double Indemnity,”the easygoing Bill Crider finding his muse in Mickey Spillane’s violent “The Big Kill,” and the seemingly normal Stephanie Kane finding inspiration in Jim Thompson’s Hellish “The Killer Inside Me.”

You just never know, do you? Still waters and all that.

I missed Charles Benoit’s “Relative Danger” (Poisoned Pen Press, 256 pages, $14.95) when it came out in hardcover but happily caught up with it in its trade paperback edition.

The delicious opening describes how Russell Pearce was shot to death in a Singapore hotel 50 years ago.

In the present, his nephew Douglas Pearce receives a letter from a strange woman asking to meet. When they do, the worldly sophisticate offers him an all-expenses-paid trip to what used to be called the far corners of the world (which sounds lovely but always confused me; isn’t the world round?) to find out who killed her old friend and why.

Doug is a naive young brewery worker from a small town in Pennsylvania who loves the idea of travel and adventure but has been exactly nowhere, so it’s impossible for him to resist the offer. Edna, his benefactor, has arranged for him to meet people in various remote places, beginning (of course) in Casablanca, where the excitement starts.

It is an old-fashioned concept, a staple of 19th-century books and novels and the movies that were made from them: placing a handsome young adventurer in exotic locales, encountering scheming men and no less dangerous beautiful women, throwing one obstacle after another in his path, thrilling to see him overcome liars, thieves, and murderers.

Young Doug is not Indiana Jones, but he could pass. I want to see the movie of this book, and I can’t wait for the next one.

While I don’t get the chance to read many true-crime books, the subject matter of Daniel Stashower’s superb “The Beautiful Cigar Girl” (Dutton, 326 pages, $25.95) motivated me to take a peek.I was hooked from the first. Doesn’t the subtitle grab you, too?: “Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder.”

It should be enough to motivate you to your nearest independent book store.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.