Tales of Detection: 19 Stories
by Dorothy L. Sayers
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This collection features 42 crime stories by authors such as Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace and L.P. Hartley.Tags
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My description of 2.5 stars in my personal rating scale is “almost liked it, but not quite”, and this is a good summary of my thoughts on Great Tales of Detection. Some stories were good, or at least not bad (e.g., Christie, Jepson, Chesterton, Kennedy). Others were long-winded (Collins and Stevenson, although the last line of the Collins was quite good) or had elements that would be problematic to modern readers (Wade). And some were not even great tales of detection in my opinion, because they did not feature any real detection (Burke and Crofts, although the Crofts at least had good railway descriptions going for it). So this is not a collection I will be keeping.
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277+ Works 70,809 Members
Dorothy Sayers's impressive reputation as a contemporary master of the classic detective story is eclipsed only by Agatha Christie's. Sayers was born in Oxford and attended Somerville College, where she received a B.A. in 1915 and an M.A. in 1920. During that period, Sayers worked as an instructor of modern languages at Hull High School for Girls show more in Yorkshire and as a reader for a publisher in Oxford. Her early literary work was in poetry; she published several volumes and served as an editor for the journal Oxford Poetry from 1917 to 1919. Sayers also worked as a copywriter for a major advertising firm in London. She was president of the Modern Language Association from 1939 to 1945 and of the Detection Club in the 1950s. Around 1920 Sayers developed the idea for her detective hero Lord Peter Wimsey, and she soon published her first mystery, Whose Body? (1923), in which Lord Peter is introduced. For the next dozen or so years, Sayers wrote prolifically about Wimsey, creating in the process what many critics of the genre consider to be the finest detective novels in the English language. Perhaps her most famous Wimsey mystery was The Nine Tailors (1934). Although Sayers essentially followed the classic form in her detective fiction---a formula in which the plot assumes a greater importance than do the characters---Sayers maintained that a detective hero's greatness depended on how effectively the character was portrayed. All but one of Sayers's mysteries feature Lord Peter Wimsey. By the late 1930s, Sayers had apparently tired of writing detective fiction. She stated in 1947 that she would write no more mysteries, that she wrote detective fiction only when she was young and in need of money. Thus saying, Sayers turned her attention to her early loves, medieval and religious literature, spending her remaining years lecturing on and translating Dante (see Vol. 2). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Belongs to Publisher Series
Everyman's Library (928)
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- Canonical title
- Tales of Detection: 19 Stories
- Original title
- Great Crime Stories
- Alternate titles
- Great Tales of Detection
- Original publication date
- 1936
- Disambiguation notice
- Not to be confused with other similarly—and sometimes identically—named anthologies edited by Dorothy L. Sayers. This version contains:
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Edgar Allan Poe / The Purloined L... (show all)etter
- Wilkie Collins / The Biter Bit
- Robert Louis Stevenson / Was it Murder?
- G. K. Chesterton / The Man in the Passage
- E. C. Bentley / The Clever Cockatoo
- Ernest Bramah / The Ghost at Massingham Mansions
- Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustace / The Tea-Leaf
- R. Austin Freeman / The Contents of a Mare's Nest
- Thomas Burke / The Hands of Mr. Ottermole
- Father Ronald Knox / Solved by Inspection
- Agatha Christie / Philomel Cottage
- Anthony Berkeley / The Avenging Chance
- Freeman Wills Crofts / The Mystery of the Sleeping-Car Express
- John Rhode / The Elusive Bullet
- Dorothy L. Sayers / The Image in the Mirror
- Henry Wade / A Matter of Luck
- Milward Kennedy / Superfluous Murder
- H. C. Bailey / The Yellow Slugs
- C. Daly King / The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Mystery
- DDC/MDS
- 823.087208 — Literature & rhetoric English & Old English literatures English fiction By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Mystery fiction Mystery anthologies
- LCC
- PR1309 .D4 — Language and Literature English English Literature Collections of English literature
Statistics
- Members
- 57
- Popularity
- 538,275
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.63)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 5
