The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century
by Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake and John Steinbeck and Pearl S. Buck and Raymond Chandler and Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O'Connor and Patricia Highsmith and Stephen King and William Faulkner and John D. MacDonald and James M. Cain and Harlan Ellison and Otto Penzler and James Crumley and Willa Cather and Brendan DuBois and Joe Gores and Michael Malone and Margaret Millar and O. Henry and Sue Grafton and Henry Slesar and Cornell Woolrich and Dashiell Hammett and Dennis Lehane and Shirley Jackson and Ellery Queen and James Thurber and Tony Hillerman and Stanley Ellin and Ben Ray Redman and Ross Macdonald and Evan Hunter and Damon Runyon and Sara Paretsky and Tom Franklin and Jacques Futrelle and Harry Kemelman and Ring Lardner and Robert L. Fish and Susan Glaspell and Stephen Greenleaf and Frederick Irving Anderson and Melville Davisson Post and Jack Ritchie and Wilbur Daniel Steele and Jerome Weidman
In THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES OF THE CENTURY, best-selling author Tony Hillerman and mystery expert Otto Penzler present an unparalleled treasury of American suspense fiction that every fan will cherish. Offering the finest examples from all reaches of the genre, this collection charts the mystery's eminent history from the turn-of-the-century puzzles of Futrelle, to the seminal pulp fiction of Hammett and Chandler, to the mystery story's rise to legitimacy in the popular mind, a trend that has benefited masterly writers like Westlake, Hunter, and Grafton. Nowhere else can readers find a more thorough, more engaging, more essential distillation of American crime fiction. Penzler, the Best American Mystery Stories series editor, and Hillerman winnowed this select group out of a thousand stories, drawing on sources as diverse as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Esquire, Collier's and The New Yorker. Giants of the genre abound -- Raymond Chandler, Stephen King, Dashiell Hammett, Lawrence Block, Ellery Queen, Sara Paretsky, and others -- but the editors also unearthed gems by luminaries rarely found in suspense anthologies: William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Damon Runyon, Harlan Ellison, James Thurber, and Joyce Carol Oates. Mystery buffs and newcomers alike will delight in the thrilling stories and top-notch writing of a hundred years' worth of the finest suspense, crime, and mystery writing.
Release Date:
April 12, 2001
