Not so long ago, the major publishing houses loved their mystery lists. Simon & Schuster had an imprint called Inner Sanctum Mysteries, Doubleday had the Crime Club, Dodd Mead had Red Badge Mysteries, Macmillan had Cock Robin Mysteries, and Holt had Rinehart Suspense Novels.

Each had a logo recognizable from across the store. Simon & Schuster used a face with hair standing straight up to signify great fright; it looked like Don King taking a call from the Internal Revenue Service. Doubleday’s stylized silhouette of a man with a gun lasted more than half a century, while Dodd Mead’s police badge was used only haphazardly. The dead bird with an arrow stuck in its midsection was whimsical, while Holt used a key fashioned in the shape of a skull as its symbol.

Of the major houses, the only one still using a mystery imprint is Warner Books, with the Mysterious Press. Even they recently changed the logo, however, from the original old inn sign in the shape of an open book to a more modern design that is unreadable and doesn’t suggest mystery even slightly.

These vanishing imprints are symbolic of a change in the way mysteries are being published nowadays.

Once it was common for a house to publish a writer who predictably sold 4,000 or 5,000 copies of every book in hardcover. Many mystery authors wrote two or three books a year, almost always with a series protagonist. The publisher knew what it was getting, and so did readers. The paperback editions (and virtually all titles had a paperback reprint a year after the hardcover came out) stayed in print for years. Nobody got rich on a single title, but everyone did all right.

Today, the old publishing firms have merged, and the emphasis has been shifted from small, steady profits to occasional blockbusters that can generate enormous windfalls (which are frequently needed to offset the losses from good books gone bad). So what happened to those writers who produced intelligently plotted detective stories that had a loyal, albeit modest, following?

Some are finding a measure of comfort at small houses. The bad news is these little presses can’t afford to pay very much. The very good news, though, is that authors who were thinking of getting jobs as Whopper floppers now are being published and read again. And worthy old books are getting new lives.

One ambitious new company intent on bringing worthy old books back into print is the subtly named Felony & Mayhem Press, founded by someone who, happily, knows what she’s doing. This new venture is the brainchild of Maggie Topkis, one of the numerous owners of Partners & Crime, a popular mystery bookstore in Greenwich Village.

The name of the imprint unavoidably suggests mysteries, and there is the additional pleasure of a different icon for each of the six categories in which Felony & Mayhem will publish – British, hard-boiled, historical, traditional, espionage novels, and “vintage.” This makes identification of each subgenre as simple as looking at a Chinese menu and choosing between the Peking duck and the sliced jellyfish.

The categories offer no surprises – which is the whole idea.

The British mysteries are well written, carefully plotted, and frequently witty. The first title published was “The Killings at Badger’s Drift” by Caroline Graham. If this book weren’t so good, it would seem to be a parody of the English village mystery, complete with a vicar, a bumbling doctor, a lovable spinster, a no-nonsense police inspector, and a plethora of homemade cookies.

The second is “Death on the High Cs” by Robert Barnard, a viciously hilarious satire about the murder of an opera star whose personality provided so much cuddly warmth that practically everyone who ever met her loathed her so passionately that the police found it nearly impossible to sort through all the suspects.

The hard-boiled category begins with two quirky books by authors who are not exactly household names.

Lynn Hightower’s “Satan’s Lambs” features a female private eye who is tougher than most of her contemporaries. She doesn’t carry a gun – she carries a baseball bat. She became a P.I. because her sister was brutally murdered. She decided to channel her anger by helping other women too frightened to help themselves.

“Season of the Monsoon” by Paul Mann is set in Bombay, but his policeman, George Sansi, is very different from H.R.F. Keating’s Ganesh Ghote, who works in the same city. While Ghote is gentle and cerebral, Sansi functions more like an American, unafraid to use a bit of muscle, figuratively and literally, to get to the bottom of a case. In this first book of a trilogy, Sansi must deal with a horribly mutilated corpse discovered one of the city’s film sets.

The first two espionage novels are “Who Guards the Prince?” by the always excellent Reginald Hill and “The Cambridge Theorem” by Tony Cape, which examines the mysterious “fifth man” of the infamous Cambridge spy ring established in the 1930s whose treachery still resonates today.

The historical series begins with two books I admit I haven’t read but are now high on my list. “Man’s Illegal Life” by Keith Heller, set in London early in the 18th century, posits the possible re-emergence of the plague, which had devastated the city’s population just 50 years earlier. Anton Gill’s “City of the Horizon,” is set in Egypt around 1350 B.C. just after the death of Akhenaten (about whom Agatha Christie once wrote a mystery play).

Traditional mysteries are represented by David Carkeet’s “Double Negative” and Susan Wolfe’s Edgar winning “The Last Billable Hour,” both charmingly witty. A redundant category, it seems to me, is “vintage mysteries”: “The Case of the Gilded Fly” by Edmund Crispin, couldn’t be more British if it came packaged with fish and chips. And if “Murders in Volume 2” by Elizabeth Daly, once Agatha Christie’s favorite author, isn’t traditional, neither is turkey on Thanksgiving.

All Felony & Mayhem books are trade paperbacks and priced at $14.95. Need another reason to give an ovation to these newcomers? They sell their books exclusively to independent bookstores, so even if you want to buy them from Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Amazon.com (but why would you?), you can’t.

That may not be quite as noble as Sydney Carton, but it’s a far, far better thing they have done than most publishers have ever done.

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 openzler@nysun.com.