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Tony Hillerman (Editor),
Otto Penzler (Series Editor)
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Note, June 29, 2024: I've just edited this review to correct a typo (an omitted ) ).
Otto Penzler edits a long-running and well regarded annual anthology series called The Best American Mystery Stories, showcasing short fiction in the genre. This volume is a sort of spin-off of the series, collecting 46 of the "best" mystery tales (in the estimation of book editor Hillerman) produced by American writers in the 20th century. Not all of the 47 authors represented ("Ellery Queen" was actually the pe Note, June 29, 2024: I've just edited this review to correct a typo (an omitted ) ).
Otto Penzler edits a long-running and well regarded annual anthology series called The Best American Mystery Stories, showcasing short fiction in the genre. This volume is a sort of spin-off of the series, collecting 46 of the "best" mystery tales (in the estimation of book editor Hillerman) produced by American writers in the 20th century. Not all of the 47 authors represented ("Ellery Queen" was actually the pen name of the team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) are usually associated with the genre; several were more "literary" writers making a foray into the field, as Hillerman defines it. His definition, in fact, is broader than the conventional mystery; not all of the stories focus on the identification of a culprit or solution of a mystery, though most would fall under the broader rubric of crime fiction. The foreword by Penzler is mostly an explanation of the selection process, but Hillerman contributes a short but interesting introduction that's more substantive. Rather than the usual critical dichotomy between noir and traditional mysteries, he draws a conceptual distinction between stories that focus strictly on the solution of an intellectual puzzle, with as little distraction from the human element as possible, versus those that give equal or more attention to the same factors stressed in other types of fiction: character, relationships, moral choices, social issues, etc. (I have to confess to a preference for the latter.)
The arrangement of the stories here is chronological; the date of publication is given for each one, and the appendix gives a short bio-critical note on each author. They can range in tone from tragic to humorous. A couple of the stories feature protagonists who are actually the crooks in the story, rather than the detective --but just because they happen to be crooks doesn't necessarily mean you can't root for them. :-) Several selections were by authors whose work was new to me (though, of course, I'd heard of some of them). In a few of these stories, you'll encounter some instances of loveless illicit sex (though no explicit sex), and many of the selections have some bad language; but I take this as simply a "warts-and-all" depiction of the social realities of the settings. Seven of the stories here won the Edgar Award: "The Possibility of Evil," "Goodbye, Pops," "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," "The Absence of Emily," "By the Dawn's Early Light," "Red Clay," and "Poachers" --though, as I note below, I didn't like all of these seven! But although not all of the stories here worked for me, the many which did more than made up for the clunkers!
Eight of the stories were ones I'd previously read, all of them well-done tales of their type. One, "The Problem of Cell 13" by Jacques Futrelle (who died in the sinking of the Titanic), and featuring his polymath series character Prof. Augustus S. F. X. Van Duesen, a.k.a. "The Thinking Machine," is one of the best examples of the pure intellectual puzzle type of mystery. In it, the professor accepts a challenge to escape from a maximum-security prison within one week, just to prove he can; although the reader is privy to many of "the Thinking Machine's" outward operations, the means of escape remains illusive until the final reveal. Harry Kemelman's "The Nine Mile Walk" is also an excellent tour de force of pure deductive reasoning. James Thurber's "The Catbird Seat" doesn't really involve crime at all, but it does involve a clever scheme, related with the author's usual wry situational humor. The often anthologized "Haircut" by Ring Lardner is a classic use of an unreliable narrator, as an ingenuous barber spins a tale of local gossip to his customer in which the reader will recognize a much darker import; while O. Henry's "A Retrieved Reformation" provides one of the more satisfying of his trademark surprise endings. Ellery Queen's "The Adventure of the President's Half Disme" is one of the best hidden treasure yarns I've had the pleasure of reading. And "The Homesick Buick" by John D. MacDonald and Willa Cather's "Paul's Case," are both stories I've commented on in reviews of other collections.
While Damon Runyon's "Sense of Humor" is technically well-crafted for effect, none of the characters are remotely likeable (even the narrator), and I didn't really give a care about the outcome, though I was curious enough to finish it. "An Error in Chemistry," is definitely not on a par with Faulkner's best work in the short format, IMO. He pulls off a surprise ending --but there are details in the story that render that ending impossible, and the prose is often clumsy and confusing, especially in the dialogue (which I suspect has some careless attributions to the wrong speaker in at least one exchange!). If I'd been the editor, I'd have chosen "A Rose for Emily" over this one, hands down. These tales, though, aren't worst of the bunch by far!
"The Murder" is a sleazy piece of sadistic misogyny (with a topping of invidious ethnic stereotyping) that reflects very poorly on Steinbeck. Harlan Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" (1973) was inspired by the earlier grisly stabbing murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City, in full view of a large number of onlookers who watched from their windows and did nothing; I started to read this and quickly discovered that it's a graphic description of an attack modeled on this one, with (apparently) a gruesome blow-by-blow account of the victim's long-drawn-out sufferings. The phrase "pornography of violence" comes to mind; this was one of four stories that I deliberately decided not to read. The other three were Oates' "Do With Me What You Will," Patricia Highsmith's "The Terrapin," and Jerome Weidman's "Good Man, Bad Man." Never having liked anything by Joyce Carol Oates that I've read, I couldn't see investing time in anything else that she wrote; and the editors' biocritical notes on Highsmith and Weidman suggested to me that there is absolutely nothing in their literary visions that I'd like (or appreciate!).
Thomas Hardy famously said words to the effect that if you're going to tell a story, it needs to be worth telling. James Crumley's "Hot Springs" fails miserably to meet that test; it's a concoction of moral nihilism, foul language, misogyny, anti-Christian bigotry, and graphic violence, without a single character I liked or cared anything about. (It could easily win pride of place, IMO, in any collection of the worst 20th-century crime fiction, but doesn't belong in one devoted to the genre's best. :-( ) Some of the same comments could be made about Dennis Lehane's "Running Out of Dog" (minus the bigotry), though it's not as violent and is more morbidly pessimistic than nihilistic. These were the only two stories here that I finished by skimming.
The latter two stories exemplify noir, in the way I've always used the term. However, I liked (or at least could appreciate) the included tales by acknowledged noir masters Raymond Chandler ("Red Wind"), Ross Macdonald ("Gone Girl"), Lawrence Block ("By the Dawn's Early Light") and Stephen Greenleaf ("Iris"). And surprisingly, one of my favorite selections in this book was Dashiell Hammett's "The Gutting of Couffignal," which has plot points that recur four years later in The Maltese Falcon, a novel that got only two stars from me. But Hammett's handling of his material here is less cynical and to me much more appealing than in the novel, and his unnamed sleuth doesn't have Sam Spade's obnoxious edge. (He works for the Continental Detective Agency; though the note doesn't say so, I believe he may be the author's "Continental Op" character.) Not being a noir fan, I didn't expect much from "The Baby in the Icebox," given the image conjured by the title, and the fact that it was penned by noir master James M. Cain. To my pleasant surprise, it also proved to be one of my favorites in the collection! (No spoiler here either; but it is only fair to note that an old-fashioned icebox isn't air-tight, unlike modern refrigerators; so to readers in 1933, the title does NOT connote a death-trap in which an infant would be condemned to suffocation.)
I had an introduction, in my teens, to "Rear Window" by Cornell Woolrich, another writer associated with the noir school, through the classic Hitchcock film adaptation with James Stewart and Grace Kelly (though the story differs significantly in details --there is no counterpart to Kelly's character, for instance) but hadn't read the original. It's an effective piece of suspense writing, and deduction under circumstances that both handicap and help our protagonist. My only quibbles are that one use of the telephone doesn't really make convincing sense with 1942-vintage technology, and the eye-rolling moment when the hero tells his black servant (intending it as a compliment) that "you're as close to being white as you'll ever be." :-( (To Woolrich's credit, though, he doesn't portray the black man as either stupid or cowardly.)
True, in most of these stories the protagonists, and often other characters as well, give the impression that smart-alec mouths and chip-on-the-shoulder attitudes are job qualifications. But they do have a moral grounding and a genuine concern with the pursuit of justice and of decent dealing between human beings; they may pose ethical questions, but from the standpoint that ethics do matter. This has led me to think that perhaps, instead of asserting that these particular stories aren't "true noir," I should simply broaden my definition of noir, so that moral cynicism and nihilism isn't an essential element. That would leave a setting in milieus of very pervasive crime and corruption (on either side of the tracks), a focus on action rather than traditional detecting, and a "hard-boiled" tone as the hallmarks of the genre, and would still be a useful classification that identifies a cohesive body of fiction for comparison and contrast. But it would mean that I don't necessarily "dislike noir," but rather that I like some examples and dislike others, depending on their moral vision.
A number of stories are too dark and grim to "like" in the conventional sense. "Iris," "Poachers," Shirley Jackson's "The Possibility of Evil," Henry Slesar's "The Day of the Execution," and "The Comforts of Home," by Flannery O'Connor being among the darkest (though Hillerman spares us from the very disturbing horror of her often-anthologized "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," opting instead for a quieter and less well known selection which still affords us quite a grim vision of the negative possibilities of human behavior). But they all teach us something about compassion, and all have at least some redeeming element of human kindness or decency; they can be appreciated on that basis). The literary vision in these tales isn't about shocking us or preaching meaninglessness and despair; rather, it's about moral instruction in how to relate to our fellow humans --which sometimes is taught more effectively by negative than by positive examples. Many of the stories in this group are hard to discuss individually without including spoilers.
Also a dark tale indeed (and difficult to discuss without a spoiler) is "The Perfect Crime" by Ben Ray Redman, whom I hadn't heard of until I opened this book. I quickly recognized it as the source of a skit I saw as a teen on, I believe, Rod Serling's old TV series The Night Gallery, starring Vincent Price and James Gregory (though it differed in some details). That reduced the suspense, but ratcheted up the dread, and didn't detract a bit from the emotional wallop. I'd previously read Last Summer by Evan Hunter (who was better known under one of his many pen names, Ed McBain) as a kid. His "First Offense" has something thematically in common with the latter novel, in that they both explore the dark mentality of violent and sociopathic young people; this story also exhibits the knowledge of police procedure that he would use to become the father of the "police procedural" subgenre. Brendan Dubois' "The Dark Snow" is a look at the ugly dislike and distrust of outsiders that can warp the attitudes of some small, close-knit communities unused to getting new blood; it's set in rural New England, but I've seen the same thing in insular Midwestern towns. (The physical logistics of the resolution there don't, IMO, ring true on examination, but the narrative power carries you along without noticing that while you're reading.)
Sue Grafton basically created the modern genre character type of the tough, hard-boiled professional female sleuth, holding her own on what used to be all-male turf, with her iconic P.I. heroine Kinsey Milhone; and Sara Paretsky followed close on her heels with another popular pistol-packing woman sleuth, V. I. Warshawski. "The Parker Shotgun" and "Three-Dot Po," respectively, proved to be excellent introductions to both fictional ladies; V. I. in particular comes across as highly likeable, but neither of the two are abrasive or uncaring, and both get to solve their cases without gun-play (though in one of the stories, our heroine shows her mettle in a hand-to-hand fight). It's also worth noting that the Paretsky story is a particular treat for dog lovers; Three-Dot Po is a Golden retriever, who plays a big role in the plot. Fans of some other series detectives, such as Macdonald's Lew Archer, Block's Matt Scudder, and Greenleaf's Tanner, will be glad to see that their favorite sleuths also appear here.
One of my favorite stories here was Jack Ritchie's "The Absence of Emily." Another standout is Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers," which has a feminist subtext that makes a good antidote to the Steinbeck story. Although, IMO, one of the clues does not, on reflection, hold water, I also really liked Melville Davisson Post's "Naboth's Vineyard" (1916). Versatile writer Wilbur Daniel Steele, in "Blue Murder" (1925) evokes the parochial, close-knit atmosphere of an early 20th-century New England mountain community, to tell a perfectly-crafted tale of rancorous family dynamics, repressed grievances, sibling rivalry and romantic jealousy, with a surprise ending hidden in plain sight. What happens when two would-be bank robbers tunnel into a bank vault --and find it occupied by the hostages of a gaggle of Uzi-wielding thugs, with the bank surrounded by cops? Well, if one of the pair is Donald E. Westlake's larcenous but not altogether unlikeable anti-hero John Dortmunder, the results are apt to prove more comic than tragic; and you can read all about it in "Too Many Crooks."
Some selections --"Iris," Michael Malone's "Red Clay," and Joe Gores' "Goodbye, Pops"-- are masterful character studies. Pearl S. Buck departed from her usual Chinese setting in "Ransom" (1938) to tell a tale of the kidnapping of a toddler, which probably was influenced by the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping case, and which delivers both taut suspense and some serious thought content. "Ouitters, Inc.," the Stephen King selection, packs quite a punch as well, and explores some serious philosophical ideas, such as whether or not the ends justify the means, and the nature and limits of human freedom and autonomy. It also has real social implications --though King may not have consciously thought about them-- for things like the modern quasi-totalitarian Nanny State, and about the shortcomings (as pointed out by C. S. Lewis decades ago) of the "therapeutic" approach to social control as opposed to the approach based on the traditional concept of justice.
With themes like this, as well as studies of family and parent-child relationships, of ideal images vs. reality, of what matters in life and what doesn't, as well as the classic explorations of good and evil, right and wrong, these stories belie the dictum of critics that mere "genre" fiction, such as crime fiction, can never truly be serious fiction. (Fortunately, nobody told Dostoevsky. :-) ) My rating only takes account of the stories I actually read, not the ones I skipped; I felt that this was the only fair policy to adopt. Even the corpus that I read includes a few clunkers; but for an anthology of this size, and with the variety and quality of the other stories, I didn't feel that these detracted enough to cost the book any stars. In the main, this is a collection that justifies its title! ...more
Otto Penzler edits a long-running and well regarded annual anthology series called The Best American Mystery Stories, showcasing short fiction in the genre. This volume is a sort of spin-off of the series, collecting 46 of the "best" mystery tales (in the estimation of book editor Hillerman) produced by American writers in the 20th century. Not all of the 47 authors represented ("Ellery Queen" was actually the pe Note, June 29, 2024: I've just edited this review to correct a typo (an omitted ) ).
Otto Penzler edits a long-running and well regarded annual anthology series called The Best American Mystery Stories, showcasing short fiction in the genre. This volume is a sort of spin-off of the series, collecting 46 of the "best" mystery tales (in the estimation of book editor Hillerman) produced by American writers in the 20th century. Not all of the 47 authors represented ("Ellery Queen" was actually the pen name of the team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) are usually associated with the genre; several were more "literary" writers making a foray into the field, as Hillerman defines it. His definition, in fact, is broader than the conventional mystery; not all of the stories focus on the identification of a culprit or solution of a mystery, though most would fall under the broader rubric of crime fiction. The foreword by Penzler is mostly an explanation of the selection process, but Hillerman contributes a short but interesting introduction that's more substantive. Rather than the usual critical dichotomy between noir and traditional mysteries, he draws a conceptual distinction between stories that focus strictly on the solution of an intellectual puzzle, with as little distraction from the human element as possible, versus those that give equal or more attention to the same factors stressed in other types of fiction: character, relationships, moral choices, social issues, etc. (I have to confess to a preference for the latter.)
The arrangement of the stories here is chronological; the date of publication is given for each one, and the appendix gives a short bio-critical note on each author. They can range in tone from tragic to humorous. A couple of the stories feature protagonists who are actually the crooks in the story, rather than the detective --but just because they happen to be crooks doesn't necessarily mean you can't root for them. :-) Several selections were by authors whose work was new to me (though, of course, I'd heard of some of them). In a few of these stories, you'll encounter some instances of loveless illicit sex (though no explicit sex), and many of the selections have some bad language; but I take this as simply a "warts-and-all" depiction of the social realities of the settings. Seven of the stories here won the Edgar Award: "The Possibility of Evil," "Goodbye, Pops," "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," "The Absence of Emily," "By the Dawn's Early Light," "Red Clay," and "Poachers" --though, as I note below, I didn't like all of these seven! But although not all of the stories here worked for me, the many which did more than made up for the clunkers!
Eight of the stories were ones I'd previously read, all of them well-done tales of their type. One, "The Problem of Cell 13" by Jacques Futrelle (who died in the sinking of the Titanic), and featuring his polymath series character Prof. Augustus S. F. X. Van Duesen, a.k.a. "The Thinking Machine," is one of the best examples of the pure intellectual puzzle type of mystery. In it, the professor accepts a challenge to escape from a maximum-security prison within one week, just to prove he can; although the reader is privy to many of "the Thinking Machine's" outward operations, the means of escape remains illusive until the final reveal. Harry Kemelman's "The Nine Mile Walk" is also an excellent tour de force of pure deductive reasoning. James Thurber's "The Catbird Seat" doesn't really involve crime at all, but it does involve a clever scheme, related with the author's usual wry situational humor. The often anthologized "Haircut" by Ring Lardner is a classic use of an unreliable narrator, as an ingenuous barber spins a tale of local gossip to his customer in which the reader will recognize a much darker import; while O. Henry's "A Retrieved Reformation" provides one of the more satisfying of his trademark surprise endings. Ellery Queen's "The Adventure of the President's Half Disme" is one of the best hidden treasure yarns I've had the pleasure of reading. And "The Homesick Buick" by John D. MacDonald and Willa Cather's "Paul's Case," are both stories I've commented on in reviews of other collections.
While Damon Runyon's "Sense of Humor" is technically well-crafted for effect, none of the characters are remotely likeable (even the narrator), and I didn't really give a care about the outcome, though I was curious enough to finish it. "An Error in Chemistry," is definitely not on a par with Faulkner's best work in the short format, IMO. He pulls off a surprise ending --but there are details in the story that render that ending impossible, and the prose is often clumsy and confusing, especially in the dialogue (which I suspect has some careless attributions to the wrong speaker in at least one exchange!). If I'd been the editor, I'd have chosen "A Rose for Emily" over this one, hands down. These tales, though, aren't worst of the bunch by far!
"The Murder" is a sleazy piece of sadistic misogyny (with a topping of invidious ethnic stereotyping) that reflects very poorly on Steinbeck. Harlan Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" (1973) was inspired by the earlier grisly stabbing murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City, in full view of a large number of onlookers who watched from their windows and did nothing; I started to read this and quickly discovered that it's a graphic description of an attack modeled on this one, with (apparently) a gruesome blow-by-blow account of the victim's long-drawn-out sufferings. The phrase "pornography of violence" comes to mind; this was one of four stories that I deliberately decided not to read. The other three were Oates' "Do With Me What You Will," Patricia Highsmith's "The Terrapin," and Jerome Weidman's "Good Man, Bad Man." Never having liked anything by Joyce Carol Oates that I've read, I couldn't see investing time in anything else that she wrote; and the editors' biocritical notes on Highsmith and Weidman suggested to me that there is absolutely nothing in their literary visions that I'd like (or appreciate!).
Thomas Hardy famously said words to the effect that if you're going to tell a story, it needs to be worth telling. James Crumley's "Hot Springs" fails miserably to meet that test; it's a concoction of moral nihilism, foul language, misogyny, anti-Christian bigotry, and graphic violence, without a single character I liked or cared anything about. (It could easily win pride of place, IMO, in any collection of the worst 20th-century crime fiction, but doesn't belong in one devoted to the genre's best. :-( ) Some of the same comments could be made about Dennis Lehane's "Running Out of Dog" (minus the bigotry), though it's not as violent and is more morbidly pessimistic than nihilistic. These were the only two stories here that I finished by skimming.
The latter two stories exemplify noir, in the way I've always used the term. However, I liked (or at least could appreciate) the included tales by acknowledged noir masters Raymond Chandler ("Red Wind"), Ross Macdonald ("Gone Girl"), Lawrence Block ("By the Dawn's Early Light") and Stephen Greenleaf ("Iris"). And surprisingly, one of my favorite selections in this book was Dashiell Hammett's "The Gutting of Couffignal," which has plot points that recur four years later in The Maltese Falcon, a novel that got only two stars from me. But Hammett's handling of his material here is less cynical and to me much more appealing than in the novel, and his unnamed sleuth doesn't have Sam Spade's obnoxious edge. (He works for the Continental Detective Agency; though the note doesn't say so, I believe he may be the author's "Continental Op" character.) Not being a noir fan, I didn't expect much from "The Baby in the Icebox," given the image conjured by the title, and the fact that it was penned by noir master James M. Cain. To my pleasant surprise, it also proved to be one of my favorites in the collection! (No spoiler here either; but it is only fair to note that an old-fashioned icebox isn't air-tight, unlike modern refrigerators; so to readers in 1933, the title does NOT connote a death-trap in which an infant would be condemned to suffocation.)
I had an introduction, in my teens, to "Rear Window" by Cornell Woolrich, another writer associated with the noir school, through the classic Hitchcock film adaptation with James Stewart and Grace Kelly (though the story differs significantly in details --there is no counterpart to Kelly's character, for instance) but hadn't read the original. It's an effective piece of suspense writing, and deduction under circumstances that both handicap and help our protagonist. My only quibbles are that one use of the telephone doesn't really make convincing sense with 1942-vintage technology, and the eye-rolling moment when the hero tells his black servant (intending it as a compliment) that "you're as close to being white as you'll ever be." :-( (To Woolrich's credit, though, he doesn't portray the black man as either stupid or cowardly.)
True, in most of these stories the protagonists, and often other characters as well, give the impression that smart-alec mouths and chip-on-the-shoulder attitudes are job qualifications. But they do have a moral grounding and a genuine concern with the pursuit of justice and of decent dealing between human beings; they may pose ethical questions, but from the standpoint that ethics do matter. This has led me to think that perhaps, instead of asserting that these particular stories aren't "true noir," I should simply broaden my definition of noir, so that moral cynicism and nihilism isn't an essential element. That would leave a setting in milieus of very pervasive crime and corruption (on either side of the tracks), a focus on action rather than traditional detecting, and a "hard-boiled" tone as the hallmarks of the genre, and would still be a useful classification that identifies a cohesive body of fiction for comparison and contrast. But it would mean that I don't necessarily "dislike noir," but rather that I like some examples and dislike others, depending on their moral vision.
A number of stories are too dark and grim to "like" in the conventional sense. "Iris," "Poachers," Shirley Jackson's "The Possibility of Evil," Henry Slesar's "The Day of the Execution," and "The Comforts of Home," by Flannery O'Connor being among the darkest (though Hillerman spares us from the very disturbing horror of her often-anthologized "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," opting instead for a quieter and less well known selection which still affords us quite a grim vision of the negative possibilities of human behavior). But they all teach us something about compassion, and all have at least some redeeming element of human kindness or decency; they can be appreciated on that basis). The literary vision in these tales isn't about shocking us or preaching meaninglessness and despair; rather, it's about moral instruction in how to relate to our fellow humans --which sometimes is taught more effectively by negative than by positive examples. Many of the stories in this group are hard to discuss individually without including spoilers.
Also a dark tale indeed (and difficult to discuss without a spoiler) is "The Perfect Crime" by Ben Ray Redman, whom I hadn't heard of until I opened this book. I quickly recognized it as the source of a skit I saw as a teen on, I believe, Rod Serling's old TV series The Night Gallery, starring Vincent Price and James Gregory (though it differed in some details). That reduced the suspense, but ratcheted up the dread, and didn't detract a bit from the emotional wallop. I'd previously read Last Summer by Evan Hunter (who was better known under one of his many pen names, Ed McBain) as a kid. His "First Offense" has something thematically in common with the latter novel, in that they both explore the dark mentality of violent and sociopathic young people; this story also exhibits the knowledge of police procedure that he would use to become the father of the "police procedural" subgenre. Brendan Dubois' "The Dark Snow" is a look at the ugly dislike and distrust of outsiders that can warp the attitudes of some small, close-knit communities unused to getting new blood; it's set in rural New England, but I've seen the same thing in insular Midwestern towns. (The physical logistics of the resolution there don't, IMO, ring true on examination, but the narrative power carries you along without noticing that while you're reading.)
Sue Grafton basically created the modern genre character type of the tough, hard-boiled professional female sleuth, holding her own on what used to be all-male turf, with her iconic P.I. heroine Kinsey Milhone; and Sara Paretsky followed close on her heels with another popular pistol-packing woman sleuth, V. I. Warshawski. "The Parker Shotgun" and "Three-Dot Po," respectively, proved to be excellent introductions to both fictional ladies; V. I. in particular comes across as highly likeable, but neither of the two are abrasive or uncaring, and both get to solve their cases without gun-play (though in one of the stories, our heroine shows her mettle in a hand-to-hand fight). It's also worth noting that the Paretsky story is a particular treat for dog lovers; Three-Dot Po is a Golden retriever, who plays a big role in the plot. Fans of some other series detectives, such as Macdonald's Lew Archer, Block's Matt Scudder, and Greenleaf's Tanner, will be glad to see that their favorite sleuths also appear here.
One of my favorite stories here was Jack Ritchie's "The Absence of Emily." Another standout is Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers," which has a feminist subtext that makes a good antidote to the Steinbeck story. Although, IMO, one of the clues does not, on reflection, hold water, I also really liked Melville Davisson Post's "Naboth's Vineyard" (1916). Versatile writer Wilbur Daniel Steele, in "Blue Murder" (1925) evokes the parochial, close-knit atmosphere of an early 20th-century New England mountain community, to tell a perfectly-crafted tale of rancorous family dynamics, repressed grievances, sibling rivalry and romantic jealousy, with a surprise ending hidden in plain sight. What happens when two would-be bank robbers tunnel into a bank vault --and find it occupied by the hostages of a gaggle of Uzi-wielding thugs, with the bank surrounded by cops? Well, if one of the pair is Donald E. Westlake's larcenous but not altogether unlikeable anti-hero John Dortmunder, the results are apt to prove more comic than tragic; and you can read all about it in "Too Many Crooks."
Some selections --"Iris," Michael Malone's "Red Clay," and Joe Gores' "Goodbye, Pops"-- are masterful character studies. Pearl S. Buck departed from her usual Chinese setting in "Ransom" (1938) to tell a tale of the kidnapping of a toddler, which probably was influenced by the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping case, and which delivers both taut suspense and some serious thought content. "Ouitters, Inc.," the Stephen King selection, packs quite a punch as well, and explores some serious philosophical ideas, such as whether or not the ends justify the means, and the nature and limits of human freedom and autonomy. It also has real social implications --though King may not have consciously thought about them-- for things like the modern quasi-totalitarian Nanny State, and about the shortcomings (as pointed out by C. S. Lewis decades ago) of the "therapeutic" approach to social control as opposed to the approach based on the traditional concept of justice.
With themes like this, as well as studies of family and parent-child relationships, of ideal images vs. reality, of what matters in life and what doesn't, as well as the classic explorations of good and evil, right and wrong, these stories belie the dictum of critics that mere "genre" fiction, such as crime fiction, can never truly be serious fiction. (Fortunately, nobody told Dostoevsky. :-) ) My rating only takes account of the stories I actually read, not the ones I skipped; I felt that this was the only fair policy to adopt. Even the corpus that I read includes a few clunkers; but for an anthology of this size, and with the variety and quality of the other stories, I didn't feel that these detracted enough to cost the book any stars. In the main, this is a collection that justifies its title! ...more
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