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Book Review of The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

algernon99 avatar reviewed on + 418 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


I am a fan of mystery short stories. I have read about 5,000 of them in the last four years. This book is the best collection of top-flight, absolutely outstanding stories I have yet run across. They go from the earliest such stories (Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe) to modern stories that were new when this 1996 book was published. The recent stories are by such luminaries as Sue Grafton, Linda Barnes, Tony Hillerman, and Marcia Muller. All the stories are classics, not in the sense of old, old stories that have stuck around, but in the sense that everyone who reads them loves them--and, once they are old, people will still be reading them. You cannot go wrong with this book.