Twelve Tales of Murder

The stories collected in this nail-biting anthology are a macabre celebration of the ingenuity of murder. Victims meet their ends in ways which are sometimes gruesome, sometimes tragic, but always imaginative, involving methods as diverse as sword swallowing, triggered bank vaults, and exploding sweets.
In Twelve Tales of Murder, Jack Adrian brings together stories by well-known writers in the genre, as well as rarer stories which have for decades been unavailable to readers. For anyone who has ever been gripped by a good murder mystery, and for those who never have but are tempted, Twelve Tales of Murder is a delightful guide to who did what to whom, and how.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192880756
• ISBN13: 9780192880758
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

The Inventiveness of Murder

Jack Adrian's anthology of murder stories in the Oxford Twelves series is an agreeably fiendish collection supplying enough chills and thrills to last through many a dark and stormy night. As usual, the anthologists in this series comb through the 19th and early 20th centuries for their wares and the authors represented are both famous and obscure. The gruesomeness of the murder methods in "An Illustration of Modern Science" (1896) would meet with the approval of Hannibal Lecter himself, and Conan Doyle would be hard pressed to conjure up a more sinister portrait of London than the one we see in "Fogbound" (1903). As for the disquieting "Portrait of a Murderer" (1942), it leaves the reader with a completely new perspective on the meaning of fatherly love. I am a big fan of the Oxford Twelves series (I have them all) and heartily recommend this book as well.