MURDER BY THE BOOK

Sixteen reprints from 1933 to 1973 showing golden age–inspired puzzle masters doing what they do best: bringing together readers, books, and felonies.

Even more than in other entries in the British Library Crime Classics, the hallmarks here are urbane literacy and unfettered conceptual invention. There’s a pleasing variety in the ways books make it into the stories. G.D.H. and M. Cole, Nicholas Blake, Gladys Mitchell, and Marjorie Bremner present writers who become victims of homicide; the writers in the stories by Philip MacDonald, Michael Innes, Victor Canning, and Edmund Crispin take on a more active role. Thirty-seven books go missing in S.C. Roberts’ superior Sherlock-ian pastiche; a smaller number of books provide pivotal clues in the stories by E.C. Bentley, A.A. Milne, Roy Vickers, and Ngaio Marsh. John Creasey leaves London for a tale of family trauma set in India; Julian Symons shows detective Francis Quarles picking up on a dying message whose import will be shudderingly obvious to every red-blooded American reader; and Christianna Brand’s “Dear Mr. Editor…” turns an editor’s routine request to one Christianna Brand for a contribution to a new collection into a fiendishly twisty tale of plot and counterplot. Although the stories naturally vary in quality, they all pull their weight; editor Edwards, avoiding obvious contributions like G.K. Chesterton’s “The Blast of the Book,” mixes well-known and more obscure authors and resurrects at least several unjustly forgotten titles along the way; and the best of them, by Roberts, Vickers, Innes, and especially Brand, are cause enough for joy even among bibliophobes.

Perhaps the single best collection yet in this blue-chip series.