Patricia Craig

The best anthology of its kind, showing even more consistently good taste than Ellery Queen in their big Modern Library anthology. Those anthology staples "The Avenging Chance," "The Witness for the Prosecution," "The House in Goblin Wood," "Silver Blaze," and "Solved by Inspection" are all justifiably here to anchor the collection, while the less familiar selections generally testify to Craig's wide reading in the genre and excellent taste.

Some quibbles of course. Crime stories of the "biter is bit" genus are perhaps overrepresented leading to a bit of repetitiousness, nor do such stories really qualify as detective fiction. Craig complains that all but two or three of Chesterton's Father Brown stories are tedious and melodramatic "moral parables" rather than classical detective stories, then selects for inclusion one of the preachiest of them all ("The Oracle of the Dog"); I'd have selected "The Sign of the Broken Sword" or "The Invisible Man" or "The Queer Feet" or "The Eye of Apollo" or "The Miracle of Moon Crescent" or "The Dagger with Wings" myself. It would also have been nice to find space for "The Two Bottles of Relish" by Lord Dunsany, surely one of the top ten short stories in this genre.… (more)