Friday, June 1: Bandersnatches
LUCKY THIRTEEN
Your Friday columnist selects his favorite mystery anthologies (part one)
by Steven Steinbock
We who gather at Criminal Brief are here to celebrate the mystery short story. Maybe sometime I’ll give you a tour of the various magazines – pulps, broadsheets, slicks, and digests – in which most mystery shorts first appeared. But this week I’ll begin looking at anthologies, specifically my top thirteen volumes of mystery stories.
In his introduction to 101 Years’ Entertainment, Fred Dannay (half of the Ellery Queen writing team) wrote:
“The value of the anthology to both student and lay reader is threefold: (a) It often contains short stories which never saw book publication and are taken directly from periodicals and original manuscripts. (B) It keeps alive the best work of the older authors, whose books have been long out of print and would not therefore be available to present-day readers. (It can be said with exact truth that characters like The Old Man in the Corner and Eugène Valmont owe their continued existence wholly to anthologists). And (C) it memorializes the best stories of modern authors.”
I’m about to step into tricky territory. I’ve scoured two-and-a-half shelves and one box, sorting through all my crime/mystery anthologies in an attempt to pick my favorite ten. I was able to pick nine, knowing full well that I was being subjective, biased, and incomplete. But once I had nine, I was stuck with a three-way tie for the tenth position. About this time I noticed another anthology on a shelf with my reference books. Aw heck, I thought, I may as well take all thirteen.
Looking over my selections, I quickly realized how hopelessly incomplete this list would be. How, for instance, could I have neglected the many recent collections put together by Otto Penzler, or the wonderful thematic anthologies compiled by Martin Greenberg? With a truckload of Ellery Queen collections, how was I to choose between Napoleons of Mystery, Masters of Mystery, The Golden Thirteen, or the several Queen’s Awards collections? Organizations like CWA, MWA, Sisters in Crime, and Malice Domestic have all produced anthologies, some on an annual basis. How could I keep it to thirteen?
For clarification, each of the volumes I selected is a multi-author anthology. Single-author collections will be the topic of some future Bandersnatch. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I don’t claim to have read every story in every one of these anthologies. (Four of them I can say for certain I’ve read cover-to-cover, and two others I’m not sure about. But the rest it’s more catch as catch can). One of the anthologies was chosen purely because I was quoted in the introduction. So much for objectivity.
In order of publication date, here is part one of my top thirteen collections:
Omnibus of Crime edited by Dorothy L. Sayers (1929). I have to say up front that I’m not a fan of Dorothy Sayers. (Gasp! Sacrilege!) I don’t apologize. Her writing is pompous and bloated, and had I met her in person, I’m fairly certain I’d find her arrogant and bigoted. Nonetheless, I’d be hard pressed to find a collection that would be better company on a desert island. She starts with a thorough and insightful introduction, then surveys the many subgenres and themes through the 62 stories in this collection. There are an handful of ancient stories (Hebrew, Greek, and Roman). Classic mysteries by Poe, Doyle, Chesterton, as well as stories by authors not normally counted among mystery writers: Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, etc. The book contains one of my father’s favorite stories, “The Gioconda Smile†by Aldous Huxley. The downside of this collection can be summed up with that dreaded expression that irritates so many of us who love the mystery, and is a major peeve of James Lincoln Warren: Sayers makes a conscious effort to “transcend the genre.†She pushes the boundaries of the mystery to the point that her selections neglect many of the really great mystery writers of her day.
Detection Medley edited by John Rhode (1939?). This is something of a rarity. My copy is weather-beaten with an unreadable spine. Published by Hutchinson & Co. in collaboration with the Detection Club, there is no copyright date anywhere within. John Rhode wrote the introduction, and the forward was written by A.A. Milne. Here we get stories by the detective-story authors that Sayers left out (including two stories by Sayers herself). There are three stories by John Dickson Carr (two of them under the “Carter Dickson†name), as well as pairs of stories by Baroness Orczy, Anthony Gilbert, Margery Allingham, and Agatha Christie. Also included are a number of essays: Chesterton’s short ode to Poe’s “Rue Morgue,†and R. Austin Freeman’s beautiful “The Art of the Mystery Story.â€
101 Years’ Entertainment edited by Ellery Queen (1941). This book has the scholarly completeness of Sayers’ Omnibus and the affection of the Detection Club’s Medley. In just under a thousand pages, Queen (Fred Dannay) provides fifty great stories preceded by a nice, thirteen-page overview of the genre. Like Sayers, he divides the stories thematically, but without any highbrow pretensions. In the section of “The Great Detectives†he includes stories about detectives Martin Hewitt (by Arthur Morrison), The Thinking Machine (Jacques Futrelle), Dr. Thorndyke (R. Austin Freeman), Max Carrados (Ernest Bramah), Reggie Fortune (H.C. Bailey), and Sam Spade (Dashiell Hammett). Some of the other writers whose stories are included are Robert Barr, E.C. Bentley, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, Mignon Eberhart, Octavus Roy Cohen, Maurice Leblanc, and Edgar Wallace. The premise of the entire volume is to collect the greatest detective stories beginning with Poe (1841) to the present (1941). Queen pulls it off and then some.
Next week check back when I will tell you about a few more of my favorite anthologies, including Anthony Boucher’s Four-&-Twenty Bloodhounds (1950), Hans Santesson’s The Locked Room Reader (1968), and Hugh Greene’s The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1970). By then the list may have stretched to fourteen, but I promise it will still be lucky.
Don’t be put off by 101 Years’ Entertainment’s nearly 1000 pages.
I read the book recently, cover-to-cover as fast as I could, and would willingly have devoured another 1000 such pages. Dannay’s “Introduction” should not be missed. It contains such gems as: “literature follows man like a dog.”
How little has changed since 1941 when Dannay penned his “Introduction.” He writes: “The detective novel is a short story inflated by characterization and description and romantic nonsense, too often for purposes of padding, and adds only one innovation to the short-story form: the byplot, or red herring, which when badly used serves only to irritate when it is meant to confuse…… Notwithstanding the pristine purity of the short form , … prominent authors of detective fiction … avoid it… [perhaps] because in the 20th Century the publication of detective short stories has proved commercially unprofitable….”
Tom, I agree with all you said. And that is a nice quote that you pulled from the intro.
I think it’s interesting that Dannay’s intros in 101 Years’ Entertainment were pretty conservative compared to the story intros that he wrote for the magazine. Often the introductions ran almost a full page. (And not infrequently, they were better written than the stories themselves. Dannay had wit!)
Hey,how come I did not know your dad’s favorite?;-)
Thanks for asking me not to edit this discourse as it really was fresh reading for me today. Love ya bub 😀
Uhm, thanks honey. (That last comment came from my wife).