The Vintage Book of Classic Crime
The great Raymond Chandler once noted that "the detective or mystery story . . . has become so thoroughly explored that the real problem for a writer now is to avoid writing a mystery while appearing to do so." And that is precisely what the contributors in this masterful anthology have accomplished. For in The Vintage Book of Classic Crime, Michael Dibdin has assembled fifty-four of the most stylish, original and subversive examples of the literature of murder.
Whether written by eminent practitioners such as James M. Cain or Dashiell Hammett, or distinguished "amateurs" like Ernest Hemingway or Franz Kafka, the stories, essays, and novel excerpts in this volume push past their genre's familiar conventions to explore what makes crime…