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The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stories

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 8 months ago

Van Thal, Herbert (Ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stories (1995)

 

I am not well acquainted with other genres, so perhaps someone who is can enlighten me: do readers of horror anthologies look forward to finding, amongst the tales of carnage and depair, a few chucklesome extracts from The Canterville Ghost? Do fantasy story collectors ever throw in the occasional Womens' Weekly romance among the doctors and nurses of Gloucestershire, Melbourne or Martha's Vineyard, just for a change? Surely not: and yet nobody seems to bat an eyelid when a book which announces itself to contain 'Great Detective Stories' has at least two stories which have nothing to do with detection whatsoever, and another two which are very much borderline cases.

 

Here are the main offenders:

 

  • Out of Paradise by E.W. Hornung -- a Raffles story
  • The Girl With the Red-Gold Hair by June Thomson -- in which a man kills a prostitute. That's about it, really. (By the way, has anyone else noticed that the main role of prostitutes in British crime fiction is to get killed? The entrance of a prostitute is as sure a sign of homicide to come as the appearance of a blackmailer.)
  • The Alibi by J.C. Squire -- titled landowner is suspected by uppity police when his guest is killed.
  • The Hanover Court Murder by Sir Basil Thomson -- half-witted investigator and his slightly brighter Watson try to extract fun from dismembered medical school specimens.

 

There is very little deduction in The Cave of Ali Baba by Dorothy L. Sayers, Inspector Ghote and the Miracle Baby by HRF Keating, To Protect the Innocent by Elwyn Jones, The Man Who Grassed by John Wainwright or The Scarlet Butterfly by Dulcie Gray, but at least there is a detective, so I am inclined to pass those. The detective in Lot's Wife by F. Tennyson Jesse is aided by ESP, which is cheating.

 

Apart from these the book -- actually cobbled together from four smaller books, without any repagination -- is a useful collection of slightly less well-known work by authors from over 100 years of detective writing, from Gaboriau and Orczy through to Laurence Treat and Antonia Fraser. The selections are overwhelmingly British, but the book concludes with an Ellery Queen which was unfamiliar to me -- The Black Cats Vanished -- implausible but fairly clued. A grand total of nearly 1000 pages makes this an excellent book to have, provided the paperback binding holds up. And critics of Christie's characterisation should all be required to read her Sing a Song of Sixpence, in which the neat twist at the end brings us all back to earth with a resounding thud.

 

Jon.

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