New Chabon Mystery Book? Nope

An astute site visitor passed along a curious URL for a listing on Amazon’s UK site for what appeared to be a new Chabon book, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. The listing even had a publication date (May 2010), a publisher (Harper Perennial), and a page count (400). It even has the same title of a book of short stories Chabon said in 2002 he was going to eventually write. So it must be real, right?

Apparently not. I checked in with Michael Chabon, who said the listing is a mistake and no such book exists.

A book of eight short stories carrying that title was announced back in 2002, after Miramax won an option for the unwritten collection that was to include “a horror story, a Sherlock Holmes adventure, a ghost story, an adventure story, a science fiction story, a story of suspense, a costume or period or historical story and a sea story” in styles similar to H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, according to an article by DealMemo.com at the time.

But Chabon said Sunday that book was what ultimately became 2004’s The Final Solution.