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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.
