100 GREAT DETECTIVES
edited by Maxim Jakubowski
Julian Symons on Sam Spade, Paula Gosling on Rex Stout, Loren D. Estleman on Philip Marlowe, Anne Hart on Hercule Poirot—and 96 other mystery writers on favorite literary detectives, each limned in a short essay appended by a bibliography and edited by Jakubowski (ed., New Crimes, 1990). Mystery lovers will enjoy these generous, generally upbeat homages—many written with appropriate stylistic flourish (e.g., Linda Semple presents her essay on V.I. Warshawski as a ``Surveillance Report'')—and, no doubt, will discover new detectives to pursue, such as Ed Lacy's 1950's black private eye, Toussaint Marcus Moore, profiled here by John Williams. Could Jakubowski find no writer, however, whose favorite detectives were Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles, Stephen Greenleaf's John Marshall Tanner, or—the most glaring omission here—the most popular fictional detective of the past 50 years, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer?