Publisher's Synopsis
Now expanded to include in one volume four complete collections of detective stories compiled by the master anthologist Herbert van Thal, this extraordinarily popular Mammoth Book adds nine more tales by major mystery writers to its suspenseful pages. Joining such classic authors of the detective tale as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Dulcie Gray, Christianna Brand, June Thomson, G. K. Chesterton, E. C. Bentley, Michael Innes, Georges Simenon, and Raymond Chandler, along with nineteenth-century forebears like William Wilkie Collins, are such eminent names in the field as Ellery Queen, John Wainwright, Antonia Fraser, and P. D. James. New to this volume, too, are taut, literate tales of criminal intent and murderous purpose like Lawrence Trent's "B as in Bludgeon," Elwyn Jones's "To Protect the Innocent," F. Tennyson Jesse's "Lot's Wife," Sir Basil Thomson's "The Hanover Court Murder Case," and Hulbert Footner's "The King of the Gigolos." Accompany the sleuths in these engaging and challenging tales as they seek the key to the mystery -- some of them with superior intelligence, others with dogged determination, an overactive curiosity, or intuitive brilliance -- and as they crack "The Moabite Cipher" of R. August Freeman or solve "The Mystery of the Child's Toy" by Leslie Charteris or discover what "The Judge Corroborates" by J. S. Fletcher. You'll be continually, chillingly, and amply riveted.
