Masterpieces of Mystery and Suspense

Book Overview

This giant anthology brings together forty of the finest mystery stories ever written--many rare or unanthologized--by such towering names in the field as Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312022514
• ISBN13: 9780312022518
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 651 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Nice entree to the genre

Quite a satisfactory collection of dozens of short stories, encompassing the mystery subgenres of murder mystery, suspense, and crime fiction. I've been a longtime Sherlock Holmes reader, and felt a desire to become a bit more acquainted with other characters and stories within this general field. This volume proves more than adequate for this purpose, including stories by everyone from Agatha Christie to Mark Twain. The most lasting impression, for me, was left by G.K. Chesterton and his "Father Brown" detective stories, one of which is included here. A sleuth more unlike Holmes one will never find, but the tale of "The Blue Cross" is just as readable and pleasurable as anything from the pen of the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.This book is also probably quite useful to fans of the genre as a means of collecting many short stories not otherwise readily available, but as I'm not an expert I'll leave that open to conjecture. Suffice to say that Chesterton is not the only author in this book whose work leaves me wanting more. While several of the stories are a bit obvious even to a novice mystery reader like me, most are very enjoyable and suspenseful to the last moment. "The Nuggy Bar" indeed......