Perfect Crimes: My Favorite Mystery Stories

The 11 short stories collected here were chosen by Roosevelt ( Murder in the Oval Office ) because contemporary ``readers . . . don't know many of these classic tales.'' Some have withstood the test of time: Cornell Woolrich's suspenseful Three O'Clock ; Steve Fisher's Laura -esque study of obsessive perversion, Goodbye, Hannah ; Russell Maloney's farcical Inflexible Logic , in which six monkeys at typewriters do, indeed, write Hamlet . Craig Rice's One More Clue is a fine introduction to her lawyer/sleuth John J. Malone, and Stanley Ellin's Coin of the Realm remains a gripping narrative. But some entries disappoint: Harry Kemelman's suspend-your-disbelief study in deduction, The Nine Mile Walk , and Lord Dunsany's easy-to-solve The Two Bottles of Relish , among others. Since the stories do not focus exclusively on ``the perfect crime,'' the collection is deceptively titled. (Dec.)