Great Stories of Crime and Detection (MbD’s Deal Me In challenge)

Great Stories of Crime and Detection
by H.R.F. Keating, Various Authors
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 2002
Pages: 1784
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Folio Society

I’m a week behind – not in reading for the challenge, but for posting my thoughts, so today it’ll be two entries; one for this week and one for last.

As I’ve done for the other anthologies I’m using in this challenge, I’m creating one post per anthology – or in this case the boxed set of 4 volumes.  I’ll share some quick(ish) thoughts about each story as I read them and append them to the top of post.  Previous thoughts will be under the ‘read more’.  Since this is a multi-volume collection, it will cause a bit of a mess, but I’ll try to keep it neat.

Volume III:  The Forties and Fifties

No Motive by Daphne du Maurier:  ✭✭✭✭

Wow.  Who knew du Maurier write a story with zero melodrama?  This is a straight up mystery and we follow the private detective as he digs into the past of the victim in an effort to determine whether or not she committed suicide, and if so, why, or she was murdered.

du Maurier’s taste for tragedy is satisfied in the details and the suspense comes from how the private detective is going to report his findings.   A really solid short story from the maven of gothic fiction.

Volume IV: The Sixties to the Present (2000)

The Wink by Ruth Rendell: ✭✭✭

This volume and I are just not destined to be BFFs.  While Rendell’s writing in this story is excellent and she does a fantastic job in just a few pages of making these characters come to life, this is not a mystery at all.  This is a snippet from one woman’s life; a woman who lived through a horrible moment in her life alone, and had to face her attacker again and again throughout her life and how she finally levelled the playing field.  Well written but ultimately anti-climatic, and definitely no mystery about it.

Volume III:  The Forties and Fifties

Cops Gift by Rex Stout:  ✭✭✭✭  

My first week’s story was a short one, even for a short story: at 4 and a bit pages, it was a very quick read but a very well written one.  Taking place on Christmas Eve made it pretty timely too.  A police detective wishing for a murder gets a theft of an expensive ring instead.  The solution was transparent, but Stout didn’t pretend it wasn’t; at 4 and a bit pages, it needed to be a straight forward mystery with a straight forward solution.  But in those 4 pages Stout set the scene and the personalities perfectly, and the solution was full of holiday cheer.

An excellent start!

The Splinter by Mary Roberts Rinehart: ✭✭✭½

I read this on Sunday, as planned, and then read it again on Monday because I couldn’t remember a. single. thing.  Not the story’s fault – it’s mine, as I was just too tired Sunday night.  On re-reading it though, the first thing that struck me is that this isn’t the style I’m used to from Mary Roberts Rinehart.  Her full-length novels generally have a gothic or ghostly feel and the only short story I had read from her up to this point (Locked Doors) was, while not gothic or ghostly, definitely spooky-ish in a Blackbeard’s tale sort of way.  This short was a straight up vanilla sort of mystery about a missing boy and his dog, and the veterinarian who treats the dog and goes on to solve the mystery based on the dog’s injuries.  It was good, and it was well written, but lacked any sort of the suspense that I’ve come to expect from MMR.

Volume IV: The Sixties to the Present (2000)

The Last High Mountain by Clark Howard: ✭✭½  

Not my jam.  I really liked the setting of the Shoshone Indian Reservation, but the rest was all too … testosterone for my tastes.  There’s no mystery here at all; it’s the story of a just-released-from-jail-early Native American, who, in exchange for the early release (which was engineered by another shady Native American), agrees to knock off the payroll for the nearby Air Force base.  It’s a story of ironic timing, lots of errors and no happy ending.  For anybody.

The Evidence I Shall Give by H.R.F. Keating: ✭✭✭½

Another ‘not-a-mystery’, but a much more enjoyable read that my first story from this volume.  H.R.F. Keating will always hold a special place in my book-loving heart for writing the novelisation of Murder by Death.  This short story, however, had none of the comedy; this was a vignette that takes place in India (written in grammatical vernacular, which drove me a little nutty); a dilemma concerning evidence due to be testified to in court the next day.  The ending was tragic and had a powerful impact that snuck up on me.