Type of bind: Hardcover
Label: FUNK & WAGNALLS PUBLISHING CO
Manufacturer: FUNK & WAGNALLS PUBLISHING CO
Printing Date: 1929
Publishing house: FUNK & WAGNALLS PUBLISHING CO
Sale Popularity Level: 4247389
Studio: FUNK & WAGNALLS PUBLISHING CO
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Do the names Octavus Roy Cohen, Thomas W. Hanshew, George Allan England, and R. T. M. Scott sound familiar to you? If not, there is no need to feel ashamed or inferior. These are just four of the dozens of semi-forgotten writers found in Eugene Thwing's ten-volume collection of vintage detective stories. Works by them and many other first-rate authors await your pleasure in these little books (each volume contains ten stories and is slightly shorter in height than a typical modern paperback).
Besides finding stories that have seldom or never been anthologized elsewhere, you will discover early detectives whose other adventures/cases you will want to read about. One of my favorite authors is Melville Davisson Post, whose series of short stories about Randolph Mason (usually a crooked lawyer) and Uncle Abner (a kind of frontier detective) I have enjoyed for years. With the help of one of Thwing's little books, I was able to sample three of Post's other series (Walker of the Secret Service, Sir Henry Marquis of Scotland Yard, and Monsieur Jonquelle of the Paris police) and decide whether I wanted to try more of them (in two cases the answer was no).
Among the surprise treasures to be found is Alexandre Dumas's "D'Artagnan and the Duel"; among the improbable (and racist) clunkers is "The Pigtail of Hi Wing Ho" by Sax Rohmer (famous otherwise for the Fu Manchu stories).
If you already have devoured the vintage stories in 101 YEARS' ENTERTAINMENT (ed. by Ellery Queen), THE WORLD'S GREAT DETECTIVE STORIES (ed. by S. S. Van Dine/W. H. Wright), and/or any or all of the three volumes of THE OMNIBUS OF CRIME series (ed. by Dorothy L. Sayers), you probably owe it to yourself to try those in Thwing's set. There are a few overlaps in the contents, but really not many, and the general quality of his selections is as high as what you will find in these more famous anthologies.
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