cover image The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stories

The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stories

. Carroll & Graf Publishers, $12.95 (800pp) ISBN 978-0-7867-0886-4

Anthologist and author Herbert Van Thal (The Tops of the Mulberry Trees) has assembled four previous anthologies in one volume, with stories by 35 eminent mystery authors, including all-time luminaries Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Wilkie Collins, Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon. The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stories ranges from mid-20th-century English villains in drag (E.C. Bentley's ""The Inoffensive Captain"") to a hypochondriac crime-writer and reluctant sleuth in Devon (Edmund Cripin's ""We Know You're Writing..."") to a mysterious, hysterical woman who hires Jemima Shore to determine if she is mother to the Parr children, wards in a notorious divorce case (Antonia Fraser's ""The Case of the Parr Children"").