Detective Duos

By Stephan Pastis

Book Overview

Sleuthing twosomes have long made their mark on detective fiction. From the unnamed narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" who adroitly recounts the virtuosity of the Parisian detective, C. Auguste Dupin; to Dorothy L. Sayers's beloved Lord Peter Wimsey and Mr. Bunter; to Lillian Jackson Braun's interspecies partnership between Phut Phat (an investigative genius who happens to be a cat) and one of its owners; detective duos have come in all guises. Indeed, there are almost as many variations of compatriot crimefighters as there are types of mystery and detective fiction.
In this marvelous anthology, a real-life detective duo--married mystery novelists Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini--have brought together 25 of the best paired puzzle-solvers in short stories of remarkable range and scope. Here are traditional tandems: Sherlock and his admiring Watson, in a devilish puzzler "The Adventure of the Empty House," alongside Nero Wolfe and his (less fawning) employee, Archie Goodwin, in "Fourth of July Picnic." Husband and wife teams are well represented by Frances and Richard Lockridge's Mr. and Mrs. North, Kelley Roos's Jeff and Haila Troy, and Patrick Quentin's Peter and Iris Duluth. Amateurs work alongside professional crimesolvers in such stories as Julie Smith's never-before-published "The End of the Earth," featuring Skip Langdon and Steve Steinman, and the clue-seeking precursors to television's Quincy appear as partnered forensic pathologists Dr. Daniel Coffee and Dr. Motilal Mookerji in Lawrence G. Blochman's "The Phantom Cry-Baby." Sleuthing tandems come in different sexes, so we find Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone and Rae Kelleher alongside Fredric Brown's Ed and Am Hunter, as well as Bill Pronzini's Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon, where crime solving crosses barriers of both gender and time. And here too is a treasure chest of detective fiction styles: pure deduction, the impossible crime, the cozy, the dark comedy, espionage, the procedural, and more, in locales as varied as the crimes themselves, from England, to Antarctica, to fast-moving trains crossing America.
Spanning more than a century of crime fiction, including both classic tales by the greats of mystery writing as well as gems from lesser-known writers, Detective Duos will captivate the sleuth in all of us.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195129105
• ISBN13: 9780195129106
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Partners in Crime

This book presents a varied selection of stories featuring crimes solved by partners, by autbors ranging from Edgar Allen Poe to Julie Smith. Although the quality of the stories varies depending on the skill of the author in using the short story form, they are all interesting. The introductory essay preceding each story gives a good summary of the author's work as a whole, not just those works which feature the duo in the story. Especially valuable is the long Introduction to the book. which discusses the many partnerships in crime-solving which appear in works too long to appear in this collection as well as those which do. I found this work to be enjoyable and a wellspring of leads to authors I had overlooked.