The Vintage Book of Classic Crime

Book Overview

The great Raymond Chandler once noted that "the detective or mystery story . . . has become so thoroughly explored that the real problem for a writer now is to avoid writing a mystery while appearing to do so." And that is precisely what the contributors in this masterful anthology have accomplished. For in The Vintage Book of Classic Crime , Michael Dibdin has assembled fifty-four of the most stylish, original and subversive examples of the literature of murder. Whether written by eminent practitioners such as James M. Cain or Dashiell Hammett, or distinguished "amateurs" like Ernest Hemingway or Franz Kafka, the stories, essays, and novel excerpts in this volume push past their genre's familiar conventions to explore what makes crime CRIME. Suspenseful and exhilarating, hard-boiled and high art, the result is a dazzling gallery of murder that reveals how daring and controversial crime writing can be. Contributors and stories include: James M. Cain, "The Postman Always Rings Twice"' Raymond Chandler, "Pick-up on Noon Street"; Anton Chekhov, "The Shooting Party"; Umberto Eco; William Faulkner, "Smoke"; Dashiell Hammett, "The Glass Key"; Ernest Hemingway, "The Killers"; George V. Higgins, "Trust"; Patricia Highsmith, "Strangers on a Train"; P.D. James and T.A. Critchley, "The Maul and the Pear Tree"; James Joyce; Franz Kafka; Elmore Leonard; Walter Mosley, "A Red Death"; Edgar Allan Poe,"The Tell-tale Heart"; Georges Simenon, "Maiget's Memoirs"; Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Under the Knife"; Julian Symons, "The Man Who Killed Himself"; Barbara Vine, "A Dark-Adapted Eye"; James Thurber; Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"; and Emile Zola, "Therese Raquin."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679768556
• ISBN13: 9780679768555
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The Best of the Best

What a treat this book is! If you're a fan of the noir style of crime fiction then this is for you. First, most stories in this book are only excerpts which leave you hanging but in a good way. These tasty excerpts are from books which compell you to go out and read the entire book. That's just what I did when I read "Squeeze Play". The book contains poems and some complete short stories which are right on the mark! A diverse collection very thorough compilation of the genre.

Collected stories for the serious mystery student.

Michael Dibdin's "Book of Classic Crime" tackles more than a century of work in this field. It features many of the usual writing suspects, from Americans Raymond Chandler, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dashiell Hammett; to Swedes Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo; Frenchman Georges Simenon; Brits Julian Symons and G.F. Newman; and Japanese mystery-maker Masako Togawa. However, Dibdin has also wrangled into these pages some distinguished authors not generally thought of as purveyors of creative carnage. C.S. Forester, for instance, is represented by the tale of a common man discovering his uncommon homicidal talents. Emile Zola sketches an unexpectedly terrifying boat ride on the Seine River. And Hunter Thompson shows his macabre humor about human sacrifices in an excerpt from "Fearing and Loathing in Las Vegas." Unfortunately, none of the pieces in this book extends beyond 14 pages. Most of them reach barely half that length. Such limits work fine in a section that Dibdin devotes to critical wisdom about the past and promise of crime fiction, the snippets drawn from essays and stories by such notables as Bertolt Brecht, S.J. Perelman, and Northrop Frye (who contends that "In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob"). Much less satisfying, though, are what Dibdin calls the "bleeding chunks" he's cut from full novels and printed here. How many readers, coming to this anthology expecting to receive a full helping of Ira Levin or Barbara Vine or James M. Cain will be infuriated to discover that all they really get is a tease, a Whitman's Sampler of literary accomplishments. If you want context for the obscenely suggestive episode from James McClure's South African cop drama "The Steam Pig," or you're dying to find out what happens to the kindly landlords in Marie Belloc Lowndes' "The Lodger"...well, you'll just have to locate the books yourself or be satisfied not knowing whodunit, why they did it, or