Recommended reading - The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

  

The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

Edited by Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert.
 
Published by Oxford University Press.
Published 1996.
Hardcover.

ISBN-10: 0195085817
ISBN-13: 978-0195085815
 
Description:
 
"Certain to be the standard anthology of American detective stories for years to come." – Edward D. Hoch, editor of The Year's Best Mystery and Suspense Stories.
 
"The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories is indispensable to anyone interested in the form." – Robert B. Parker, creator of the Boston private-eye, Spenser.
 

Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe's basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. As early as 1917, Susan Glaspell evinced a poignant understanding of motive in a murder in an isolated farmhouse. And with World War I, the Roaring '20s, the rise of organized crime and corrupt police with Prohibition, and the Great Depression, American detective fiction branched out in all directions, led by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who brought crime out of the drawing room and into the "mean streets" where it actually occurred.

 

In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty-three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America's unique contribution to this highly popular genre. Tracing its progress from elegant "locked room" mysteries, to the hard-boiled realism of the '30s and '40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman himself. There are also many delightful surprises: Bret Harte, for instance, offers a Sherlockian pastiche with a hero named Hemlock Jones, and William Faulkner blends local color, authentic dialogue, and dark, twisted pride in "An Error in Chemistry." We meet a wide range of sleuths, from armchair detective Nero Wolfe, to Richard Sale's journalist Daffy Dill, to Robert Leslie Bellem's wise-cracking Hollywood detective Dan Turner, to Linda Barnes's six-foot tall, red-haired, taxi-driving female P.I., Carlotta Carlyle. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard-edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Perhaps most important, the book offers a brilliant summation of America's signal contribution to crime fiction, highlighting the myriad ways in which we have reshaped this genre. The editors show how Raymond Chandler used crime, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a spotlight with which he could illuminate the human condition; how Ed McBain, in "A Small Homicide," reveals a keen knowledge of police work as well as of the human sorrow which so often motivates crime; and how Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer solved crime not through blood stains and footprints, but through psychological insight into the damaged lives of the victim's family. And throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life-long interest--not to say love--of this quintessentially American genre.

 

American crime fiction is as varied and as democratic as America itself. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.

Born on this day – Tony Hillerman:

Writer

May 27, 1925 – October 26, 2008

Credits:

2nd Culprit (1993); A Century of Great Suspense Stories (2001); A New Omnibus of Crime (2005); A Thief of Time (1988); Buster Mesquite's Cowboy Band (2001); Cave of Bones (2018); Coyote Waits (1990); Dance Hall of the Dead (1973); Finding Moon (1995); First Cases, Volume 3 (1999); Hillerman Country (1991); Hunting Badger (1999); Indian Country (1987); Kilroy Was There (2004); Listening Woman (1978); Lost Birds (2024); New Mexico, Rio Grande, and Other Essays (1975); People of Darkness (1980); Rock with Wings (2015); Sacred Clowns (1992); Seldom Disappointed (2001); Skeleton Man (2004); Skinwalkers (1986); Song of the Lion (2017); Spider Woman's Daughter (2013); Stargazer (2021); The Sacred Bridge (2022); Talking God (1989); Talking Mysteries: A Conversation With Tony Hillerman (1991); The Best of the West (1991); The Blessing Way (1970); The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (1972); The Dark Wind (1982); The Fallen Man (1996); The First Eagle (1998); The Fly on the Wall (1971); The Ghostway (1984); The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other Indian Country Affairs (1973); The Great Taos Bank Robbery: And Other True Stories (2023); The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction (2004); The Mysterious West (1994); The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories (1996); The Perfect Murder (1991); The Serpent's Tongue: Prose, Poetry, and Art of the New Mexican Pueblos (1997); The Shape Shifter (2006); The Sinister Pig (2003); The Spell of New Mexico (1976); The Tale Teller (2019); The Wailing Wind (2002); The Way of the Bear (2023); Tony Hillerman's Indian Country Map and Guide (1987).

Movies and television:

A Thief of Time (2003); Coyote Waits (2003); Dark Winds (2022–2023); Ex Libris (1989); Skinwalkers (2002); Skinwalkers: The Navajo Mysteries (2002); The Dark Wind (1991); The Silence of Cricket Coogler (2000); Two Grey Hills (2001).

Writer

Recommended reading - A New Omnibus of Crime (2005)

 

A New Omnibus of Crime (2005)

Edited by Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert.

Contents:

Introduction; The Man Who Knew How; The Girl with the Silver Eyes; Red Wind; The Wench Is Dead; Gone Girl; The Couple Next Door; By the Scruff of the Soul; A Poison That Leaves No Trace; Photo Finish; The Crime of Miss Oyster Brown; Red Clay; Barking at Butterflies; Running Out of Dog; Hostages; When the Women Come Out to Dance; Flowers That Bloom in the Spring; Woodrow Wilsons Necktie; Loopy; Great Aunt Allies Fly Papers; First Lead Gasser; Chee’s Witch; Breathe Deep; Rumpole and the Bubble Reputation; The Hanged Man; The Holly and the Poison Ivy; Copycat; He Loved to Go for Drives with His Father; Credits; Index.

Description:

Three-quarters of a century ago, Dorothy L. Sayers compiled the classic anthology The Omnibus of Crime, a definitive collection of short fiction that brought together crime and mystery works from the Apocryphal Scriptures to whodunits from the 1920s.

Now, reflecting the explosive developments in the genre, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of that book's publication with A New Omnibus of Crime. 

Like Sayers's volume, this new book is envisioned as a vehicle carrying stories the editors think represent the best in crime and mystery writing in our time. Selections also reflect the tastes of Contributing Editors Sue Grafton and Jeffery Deaver, both of whom have stories in this volume.

The anthology begins with a story by Sayers herself; other giants of the genre including Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, are also represented among the twenty-seven works. Hillerman and Herbert introduce each story and place each selection in the context of the literary history of the genre.

Several of the writers confide the circumstances and real-life happenings that inspired them to write their stories. The book concludes with stories by Jeffery Deaver, Alexander McCall Smith, and Catherine Aird – all in print for the first time here.

While mystery writers in Sayer’s day shunned the love interest as a distraction from a puzzling plot, some of these stories show how the depiction of love – thwarted or otherwise – can effectively enrich crime writing. In the last seven-plus decades, the use of a distinctly regional voice has also revitalized the genre, as our selection of stories shows.

And while Sayer’s contemporaries looked at crime as something that could be solved and “tidied up,” writers here take the view that the effects of crime linger like a stain even after a solution has been reached. Illustrating another more recent trend, pets romp through these pages, some in surprising ways.

Like passengers on an omnibus, the stories that keep company here are colorful and mixed. Some will inspire laughter while others will incite chills. All will keep readers turning the pages.

We invite you to hop on, take a ride, and get to know them.