Great American Detective Stories

Introduction

The object of this anthology is to give you some good reading.

It isn’t a definitive historical survey of the American detective story; I think you’re more interested in how a story reads today than in its place in the development of the form. It isn’t even a selection of the absolute masterpieces; people who read one anthology are apt to have read one or two others, and such pure gems as “The purloined letter,” “A man called Spade,” “The Doomdorf mystery,” “Man bites dog,” and “The problem of Cell 13” are getting just a little bit over-familiar. So what’s aimed at here is this: a collection of topnotch stories by the best American detective story writers, chosen in the hope that you’ve read very few of them elsewhere. (Most of these stories appear here for the first time in any anthology and half of them for the first time in book form.)

Now you know what you’re getting into.

The detective short story belongs to us. It started in America and it started off magnificently. In five stories, Edgar Allan Poe created the form and almost all its possible variants. But then the English took the play away from us. The detective short never quite died out in America; even in our period of being overshadowed we were producing the exploits of EBENEZER GRYCE and THE THINKING MACHINE and LUTHER TRANT and RANDOLPH MASON — to say nothing of NICK CARTER. But how could even these compete with DR. THORNDYKE and FATHER BROWN and SHERLOCK HOLMES?

The detective short belonged to England up till about the middle ’20’s, when such pulps as Flynn’s and Black Mask began to flourish. Gradually it has become apparent, even to the most doubtful critics, that the best of the detective pulps offer a rich field of stories, in which Dashiell Hammett stands like Shakespeare among the Elizabethan dramatists — not a giant among pygmies, but simply the tallest of a titanic tribe. The pulps brought pace and vigor and physical and emotional impact to the detective story; they made it approach the crude realities of American police work and the daily routine of the private operative.

But these pulps, the English might object, represent only one school of the detective story (although in fact they have influenced all schools save possibly the ultra-slick and the ultra-sedate); and where is the American market for detective shorts of other types? For years it seemed almost as though there were none; magazines aimed at the literate reader of less-than-hardboiled mystery novels were not successful. Ellery Queen’s Mystery League folded after four issues; and Tower’s Mystery Magazine, too, succumbed in time.

Then in 1941 there appeared on the newstands an attractive magazine of 12mo format, well printed on good book paper, with a distinguished Stefan Salter cover. It was the first issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and at last the possible English objections were answered. Queen’s editorial work in this magazine and in his anthologies and the public reception of both have at last established the detective short story, in all its ramifications, as a proud American possession.

There are as many kinds of detective short stories as there are of detective novels — perhaps more, since it’s hard to find a novelistic equivalent of such tight-packed capsules as the O’MALLEY stories — and you’ll find most of them here from the ethical poetry of Melville Davisson Post to the brash foolery of Frank Gruber. One omission, I confess, is what its admirers call character-and-atmosphere and its detractors the Had-I-But-known school; and that is because to me at least, such sterling practitioners as Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon G. Eberhart show off their wares far more attractively in novels than in short stories.

Another omission is inevitably the detailed police-routine school (more English than American anyway) which needs a full novel to function properly. That’s why you’ll find so few professional police detectives starring in the stories that follow. The short story comes off better with the private eye, who works by short cuts and angles; better yet with the unofficial consultant, who is unhampered by the formalities binding the officials who consult him; and best of all, perhaps, with the amateur whose ingenuity or special knowledge can pierce through the secrets of a crime without pages upon pages of routine.

So here are the American detectives. Among them you’ll find a detective with five degrees after his name and a detective with no name at all, a detective who is in the Social Register and a detective who swills sherry on Skid Row, a detective who was born 2000 years after his case and a detective who died six weeks before his solution. They’re all part of the American detective story — and the American detective story today is something to make the most devout internationalist feel a certain stirring of chauvinistic satisfaction.

ANTHONY BOUCHER