I found this, in all its original hardcover Gollancz yellow-jacketed glory, at a New Jersey yard sale for 50c a couple of years ago. The previous, by-this-time-deceased owner (I bought quite a few books at this yard sale, so I got chatting with the vendors) was a librarian, and applied library-style clear plastic jacket-protectors to all her books. Obviously this one wasn't mint when she got it, but it's still in very nice condition. Look on me with envy, all ye crime-fiction collectors.

There's one real stinker in the book; embarrassingly, it's the one written by a friend, the late Ernest Dudley, a couple of whose nonfiction books I published many a long year ago. His "Chinatown Cowboy" is a sort of pastiche of Peter Cheyney's hamfisted imitations of US hardboiled crime writers -- a pastiche of a pastiche, in effect. Here's a sample of some dialogue:

Supposing -- it's like a hypothetical question -- supposing he is expecting something gift-wrapped from R-dam? And supposing it's his only son's job to collect, and does? Only this bastard of an only, everloving son, takes off on an unknown which-way? Supposing?

Supposing a story is quite awfully written? Just supposing?

A couple of the other stories pissed me off. P.D. James's "A Very Commonplace Murder" is dull as ditchwater, as really far too much of her output has been (which hasn't stopped me from putting one of her recent novels near to the top of my to-be-read pile). H.R.F. Keating's "Caught and Bowled, Mrs Craggs" is perhaps the first ever cricketing mystery story I've disliked: it reads like one long sneer against both the working class and cricketeers, its main supposed marvel seeming to be that the Cockney-accented cleaner of the title could possibly have the wit to identify a murderer where the cops failed. To be honest, I've never much liked Keating's work anyway. I once heard him on a Radio 4 discussion show sneering at mystery writers who were so stupid as to go to the effort of working out in advance who the baddie was; he himself didn't make up his mind until he was approaching his wordcount max. Yes, I thought, and that's why every time I finish one of your novels I want to throw it at the wall. You're assuming your readers are morons and can't tell that, essentially, you're cheating them.

{/rant}

There are lots of good stories here, though. I loved the feel of Ian Stuart's "The Vanity of Martin Roscoe"; it's a clever story aside from this, but it has the same sort of delicious inevitability as Roy
Vicker's old "Department of Dead Ends" stories. Peter Godfrey's "To Heal a Murder" is another very clever mystery, but at the same time it has an emotional power you don't expect to find in stories of this kind; it also does something I love in short stories, which is to indicate but not retail a backstory which you therefore have to imagine for yourself. Christianna Brand's "The Niece from Scotland" sort of double-hoodwinked me, which was of course what it was intended to do; I was grinning too much at the slight-of-hand to worry about the tale's palpable implausibility. Penelope Wallace's "The Medicine Chest" is a lovely little comeuppance short-short. Dan J. Marlowe's "The Girl Who Sold Money" invents a way of making money out of counterfeiting without running the risk of arrest. Joan Aiken's "Safe and Soundproof" is a wonderfully sweet little piece (as is its heroine):

There she sat, pretty as a bumble-bee with her gold eyes and brown hair, attracting even more attention than men with hydraulic grabs on building sites.

I read that opening line and was so jealous!

Add in some above-average tales by the likes of Julian Symons, Colin Watson, Joyce Porter (although the humour in this Dover tale is a bit heavy-handed in places), Michael Gilbert, Celia Fremlin (a perhaps rather contrived but nicely nasty little tale) and Andrew Garve, and what more could you ask for? ( )