The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: Third Annual Collection by Ed Gorman (Editor), Martin H. Greenberg (Editor), Martin Harry Greenberg (Editor)

From the Publisher

More than 200,000 words of great crime and suspense fiction

Each year, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, editors of The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, have reached farther past the boundaries of the United States to find the very best suspense from the world over. In this third volume of their series they have included stories from Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom as well as, of course, a number of fine stories from the U.S.A. Among these tales are winners of the Edgar Award, the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers, and other major awards in the field.

In addition, here are reports on the field of mystery and crime writing from correspondents in the U.S. (Jon L. Breen), England (Maxim Jakubowski), Canada (Edo Van Belkom), Australia (David Honeybone), and Germany (Thomas Woertche).

Altogether, with nearly 250,000 words of the best short suspense published in 2001, this bounteous volume is, as the Wall Street Journal said of the previous year’s compilation, “the best value-for-money of any such anthology.”

The A-to-Z of the authors should excite the interest of any mystery reader:
Robert Barnard • Lawrence Block • Jon L. Breen • Wolfgang Burger • Lillian Stewart Carl • Margaret Coel • Max Allan Collins • Bill Crider • Jeffery Deaver • Brendan DuBois • Susanna Gregory • Joseph Hansen • Carolyn G. Hart • Lauren Henderson • Edward D. Hoch • Clark Howard • Tatjana Kruse • Paul Lascaux • Dick Lochte • Peter Lovesey • Mary Jane Maffini • Ed McBain • Val McDermid • MarciaMuller • Joyce Carol Oates • Anne Perry • Nancy Pickard • Bill Pronzini • Ruth Rendell • S. J. Rozan • Billie Rubin • Kristine Kathryn Rusch • Stephan Rykena • David B. Silva • Nancy Springer • Jac. Toes • John Vermeulen • Donald E. Westlake • Carolyn Wheat.

Publishers Weekly

There might be some undiscovered gem of a short story published in 2001 that didn't make it into this impressively eclectic third annual collection, but it's hard to see how it slipped under the eagle-eyed radar of editors Gorman and Greenberg (and their deputies Larry Segriff and John Helfers, credited in the dedication as the people "who do 99 percent of the work"). The lively mix ranges from works by the usual prolific novelist suspects-S.J. Rozan, Ed McBain, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffery Deaver, Donald E. Westlake, Ruth Rendell, Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller, Val McDermid-to the welcome return of names (like Joseph Hansen and Clark Howard) not seen often enough on book jackets of late. Howard's story, "The California Contact," has enough rich material for a novel-including a hero who would rather be a boxer than a cop, a hit man called "the Leper" who "could not be identified by fingerprinting because all of his prints and part of several fingers had been eaten away by leprosy," and a beautifully orchestrated finale at Disneyland. Carolyn Wheat's "The Only Good Judge" offers a complicated, Hitchcockian plot, in which three villains commit each other's crimes, as well as some valuable wisdom about the erroneous image of judges as shaped by the Law & Order TV series. With seven fact-and-opinion-packed reports on the world crime fiction scene, this anthology contains enough high quality reading material to sustain any genre addict's habit. (Nov. 1) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

If 2000 was, on the evidence of Gorman and Greenberg’s previous behemoth, a banner year for crime fiction, 2001 was, as baseball managers say, a "building year." At least this year’s annual shows no clear sense of direction (the seven prefaces surveying the year in mystery fiction around the world amount to little more than cheerleading and lists) and no star entries. The keynote instead is professional proficiency, from S.J. Rozan’s trap for a Chinatown con man to Clark Howard’s race to stop a hit in Disneyland to Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blind date turned stalker to Lawrence Block’s fable-like riffs on greed. Like Otto Penzler (p. 1177), Gorman and Greenberg have cherry-picked other anthologies (though not, unlike Penzler, anthologies they edited), plucking four reliables from The Mysterious Press Anniversary Anthology, three from Death by Horoscope, and two each from Malice Domestic 10, Women Before the Bench, Murder Through the Ages, and Murder in Baker Street. The most offbeat offerings are four German short-shorts (their translators unbilled) by Wolfgang Burger, Stephan Rykena, Billie Rubin, and Tatjana Kruse; the closest thing to a trend is new takes on classic tales (Edward D. Hoch turns "The Yellow Wallpaper" into an impossible disappearance, Lauren Henderson remakes the film noir The Dark Mirror, Carolyn Wheat and Carolyn Hart both have a crack at Strangers on a Train), and the more general tendency to pour a novel’s worth of experience into a short story (Joseph Hansen, Brendan DuBois, Joyce Carol Oates). Thirty-nine stories that are consistently fine, though not superfine.

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