The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories »

About the Editor
Patricia Craig is a freelance critic, reviewer, and writer. Her books include, with Mary Codogan, You're a Brick, Angela! and The Lady Investigates.

The scene: a sleeping car on the North-Western express, somewhere between Preston and Carlisle. The weapon: a small-caliber revolver. The victims: two young newlyweds, with little money and no known enemies. The puzzle: everyone in the car has an alibi, and no one was seen to leave. And thus the stage is set for another gripping detective story.
The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories gathers thirty-three engrossing tales of crime, ranging from the birth of the genre to the present day. Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Robert Barnard, and Simon Brett—all the giants of English mystery are here, as well as Christianna Brand, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, Reginald Hill, Nicholas Blake, Michael Underwood, and many more. Editor Patricia Craig treats us to Sherlock Holmes, indefatigably tracking the details of the theft of Colonel Ross's prize horse, Silver Blaze, and the murder of its trainer. In "The Oracle of the Dog," G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown sits calmly in his study, solving at a distance the perplexing murder of Colonel Druce: was it the foreign Dr. Valentine, the foppish lawyer Traill, or Floyd, the exuberant American secretary? P.D. James sends Chief Superindentant Dalgliesh on the trail of a mysterious death from some seventy years before—a case with a final, darkly ironic twist. And Robert Barnard grimly lampoons English academe in "The Oxford Way of Death." In addition to this dazzling array of stories, Craig provides a concise introduction which surveys the origins and development of this enduring genre.
Ingenious, gothic, morbid, satirical—the English detective story ranks among the most dynamic and gripping fiction. In The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories, Patricia Craig presents some of the best ever written, in an absorbing tour of the world of crime, detection, and retribution.

Publishers Weekly

Beginning with the Conan Doyle era, this collection moves chronologically past Christie and Sayers to P. D. James and the present moment. Most of the 33 stories follow the Sherlock Holmes formula: a plethora of clues and a solution by ratiocination. No hard-boiled detectives or seedy characters can be found because, as Craig ( The Lady Investigates ) informs us in her introduction, such types never took root in the English detective story--British readers evidently prefer the urbanity of the drawing-room settings roamed by upper-class sleuths. The puzzles posed by locked rooms are thus solved in ``The Oracle of the Dog'' by G. K. Chesterton. Unexplained deaths are explained--delightfully--in Freeman Wills Crofts's ``The Mystery of the Sleeping-Car Express.'' A few perpetrators get away with their crimes, as in Robert Barnard's ``The Oxford Way of Death'' and in Cyril Hare's ``Miss Burnside's Dilemma,'' but most are brought to justice. The detective story, as Craig observes, is an optimistic genre; there is always, by tradition, a solution, and therein lies our pleasure. This anthology is chock-full of deductive reasoning, whimsy and that remarkable gift of the British: understatement. (Sept.)