Twelve American Detective Stories [Paperback]

Editor of numerous annual collections and an accomplished mystery writer himself, Edward D. Hoch illustrates genres ranging from impossible crime to hard-boiled detective fiction with 12 tales from America's distinguished mystery authors. Hoch's anthology chronicles detective fiction's development from the mid-18th century through the early 1960s. If you're familiar with the classics and are looking for lesser-known selections from such character sleuths as Violet Strange, Uncle Abner, Trevis Tarrant, Sir Henry Merrivale, and Philip Marlowe, this is the book to buy.

Twelve American Detective Stories opens appropriately with a more obscure work by the forerunner of mystery, Edgar Allan Poe. In "Thou Art the Man" (1844) a murderer is exposed in a ghastly yet amusing turn of events.

Jacques Futrelle's "Thinking Machine," Professor Van Dusen, is master of impossible crime in 'The Stolen Rubens' (1907). C. Daly King's "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem" (1935), a fair play puzzle, solves the conundrum of a sealed studio with a bloody corpse sprawled inside--the gem of the bunch. Ellery Queen remains faithful to the genre in 1948's "The Dauphin's Doll," a seemingly impossible jewel robbery.

Hailed as the first female mystery writer, Anna Katharine Green brings brilliant socialite Violet Strange to center stage in "The Second Bullet" (1915). Craig Rice, née Georgiana Ann Randolph, was briefly one of the best-known female authors of the 1940s. "His Heart Could Break" (1943) features criminal lawyer John J. Malone, who discovers the real motive behind his client's "suicide."

Raymond Chandler delivers his famous pulp-fiction gumshoe prose in "The Pencil" (1959) as hard-drinking, womanizing private eye Philip Marlowe thwarts a mob plot, while a desperate murderer thinks he can outwit the cops in "One Drop of Blood" (1962), by the "father of classic noir," Cornell Woolrich.

Also featured: Melvill Davisson Post's "The Age of Miracles" (1916); T.S. Stribling's "The Shadow" (1934); "The House in Goblin Wood" (1947) by Carter Dickson (a.k.a. John Dickson Carr); and Mary Roberts Rinehart's "The Splinter" (1955). Introduction and author biographies are included. --Brina Bolanz

Murder, kidnapping, and theft are the principal crimes committed in these twelve American detective stories. The victim may be an innocent baby or a double crossing-mobster, the setting a department store or death cell at the state prison, but the detective's intellectual or intuitive powers must be unfailing, whether the important clue is a single bullet or a tiny splinter of wood. With stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Craig Rice, Ellery Queen, and Raymond Chandler, this anthology will appeal to all enthusiasts of detective fiction.

Edward D. Hoch is the author of nearly 800 published short stories, and a past President of Mystery Writers of America. From 1976 to 1981 he edited Best Detective Stories of the Year, which was followed by The Year's Best Mystery and Suspense Stories from 1982 to 1995. He has also edited two anthologies for Mystery Writer of America, Dear Dead Days (1972) and All But Impossible! (1981), as well as three anthologies in collaboration with Martin Greenberg, Great British Detectives (1987), Women Write Murder (1987), and Murder Most Sacred (1989).