The Mammoth Book Of Great Detective Stories

Ever since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle delighted readers with the fictional genius detective, Sherlock Holmes, crime fiction has been plumbed by mystery writers everywhere. This volume of 12 stories spans crime from the Bronze Age to World War II, and will appeal to the current readers of The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures and Best British Mysteries.

Pulp fiction has been looked down on as a guilty pleasure, but it offers the perfect form of entertainment: the very best storytelling filled with action, surprises, sound and fury. In short, all the exhiliration of a roller-coaster ride. The 1920s in America saw the proliferation of hundreds of dubiously named but thrillingly entertaining pulp magazines in America – Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces. It was in these luridly-coloured publications, printed on the cheapest pulp paper, that the first gems began to appear. The one golden rule for writers of pulp fiction was to adhere to the art of storytelling. Each story had to have a beginning, an end, economically-etched characters, but plenty going on, both in terms of action and emotions. Pulp magazines were the TV of their day, plucking readers from drab lives and planting them firmly in thrilling make-believe, successors to the Victorian penny dreadfuls of writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens. These stories exemplify the best of crime and mystery pulp fiction – its zest, speed, rhythm, verve and commitment to straightforward storytelling – spanning seven decades of popular writing.

Mystery conundrums from crime's finest storytellers Presenting 30 impossible mysteries and bizarre crimes guaranteed to fascinate and intrigue. The delight in these stories is unravelling the puzzle and trying to work out what on earth happened. Stories include: • A man alone in an all-glass phone booth, visible on CCTV and with no one near him, is killed by an ice pick. • a man sitting alone in a room is shot by a bullet fired only once and that was over 200 years ago. • A man enters a cable-car carriage alone and is visible the entire journey but is found dead when he reaches the bottom. • A man vanishes at the top of the Indian rope trick and is found dead miles away. • a dead man continues to receive mail in response to letters apparently written by him after he'd died. The anthology includes several brand new stories never previously published, plus a range of extremely rare stories, many never reprinted since their first appearance in increasingly rare magazines.

After Arthur Conan Doyle created the detective, Sherlock Holmes, many writers borrowed him to be the hero of their stories. The anthology offers a selection, old and new.

Hidden gems from the earliest days of mystery fiction. The years 1850-1905 represent the pre-Golden Age of crime writing. Drawn exclusively from those earliest days of mystery fiction, this revealing anthology includes a surprising number of authors not commonly associated today with crime fiction - names like Alexander Dumas, Alexander Pushkin, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stephenson, Arnold Bennett, Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. Over three-quarters of the stories in this fascinating volume have not been reproduced since the 1950s. They include: Guy de Maupassant's "The Hand"; Charles Dickens's "Hunted Down"; Maurice LeBlanc's gentleman-burglar Arsene Lupin; Conan Doyle's "The Adventures of the Three Students"; Robert Louis Stephenson's "Markheim"; Edgar Poe's Chevaller Auguste Dupin, the first genuine fictional detective; Baroness Orczy's "Old Man in the Corner"; and EW Hornung's immensely popular thief Raffles.

Gathers mysteries by Arthur Conan Doyle, Richard Harding Davis, Arnold Bennett, O. Henry, Edgar Wallace, Jack London, and G. K. Chesterton