100 Dastardly Little Detective Stories

Reading through this, I can't say I'm thrilled. It mostly delivers what's on the label, 100 short short stories, though there's been a number of them I wouldn't have classified as detective stories. I don't believe any of them are translations, and most of them apparently were written in the 20th century, though there's a few, like the Lincoln story, that were 19th century. The copyright page lists 25 stories that were printed by Frank A. Munsey Co in 1934-41, and another 22 that were printed by Popular Publications Inc in 1939-1952, 10 published between 1963-1979 and 23 published in 1980-1993, and the remaining twenty apparently without date or copyright notice.

Once you've dredged the history of mystery for short short stories--and I show more bet the complete set exhausted pretty much all of them--you really start to hit the dregs, and there's too many of these stories that flop completely. Not all of them; it pretty much covers the range from top to bottom.

Besides the contents, an anthology also rises or fails based on its structure, and this one fails. The stories are alphabetical order, which is as bad as random, breaking one pair of stories with the same characters up, and reversing their chronologically order. There's no biography on the author, not even birth & death dates, nor dates of writing or first publication. It leaves everything a little context-less and hard to place.

Okay, so it will continue to sit by my bedstand until I'll read the last 50 stories. It has value to me as a large collection of short-short stories in one volume. But I feel after I've read every last sentence, I will still be mildly disappointed. show less