© Ingrid Haunold
My rating: 3 (of 5) “stars”
I bought a copy of this book online, I use AbeBooks and zvab.com to buy used/rare books. I bought the seventh impression of the book’s first (1928) edition, which was printed in June of 1932.
This collection of short stories of three different genres – detection, mystery, and horror – contains a rather long introduction by the book’s editor, Dorothy L. Sayers.
All in all, this book was a huge disappointment. I love detection stories, but don’t care for stories of mystery or horror, which include tales of ghosts, stories of the supernatural, tales of magic, and so forth.
When this book was first published in 1928 by Victor Gollancz Ltd., the detective fiction genre was still fairly new. Edgar Allan Poe wrote several stories in the mid-1800s which became hugely popular and he is commonly credited with “inventing” many aspects of the modernd-day detection fiction genre.
This anthology contains 66 short stories, and Dorothy L. Sayers attempted to curate this collection of stories by devising several categories – too many categories, in my opinion; I consider her attempt a failure. For example, she devised separate categories for “Amateur Detectives or Private Consultants,” “The Journalist Detective,” “The Police Detective,” “The Scientific and Medical Detective,” “Specialists,” “The Intuitive Detective,” and “The Comic Detective.” She starts out by classifying the stories according to a detective’s occupation, but then creates a category based on the manner of detection (intuitive detection). But intuitive detectives have occupations, too. The category of “comic detective” is even weirder. Comic detectives also have occupations, and they can solve crimes intuitively, too. So why are those stories put into separate categories?
I think Dorothy L. Sayers failed in her attempt to categorise detection stories, and the same can be argued in regard to her attempts to categorise the stories of mystery and horror.
Most of the 66 stories contained in this book are not particularly dramatic or thrilling; some are quite boring. I found only a handful of those stories truly captivating.
It took me almost a year to finish this book, due to the fact that it is 1129 pages long, and weighs 841 grams: The book is so heavy that I did not enjoy reading it. I had to place it on a desk to read it, which did not make for an enjoyable reading experience.