Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense

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From Ed McBain to Sara Paretsky: a celebration of over fifty years of mystery masterworks.For over fifty years, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine has been one of the foremost magazines of mystery and suspense. This celebratory anthology features such bestselling writers as Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and Jan Burke, just three of the esteemed contributors to have appeared in the magazine’s pages over the past five decades. This impressive anthology reflects the diversity of every issue of the magazine: historicals and police procedurals, cozies and noirs, humor and suspense. From Jim Thompson in the fifties and Donald Westlake in the sixties, to recent stories by S. J. Rozan, Martin Limon, and Rhys Bowen, this anthology documents over a half century of superb storytelling.From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Landrigan, AHMM's editor-in-chief, has done an outstanding job of selecting 34 short stories to represent the half-century of her magazine's existence. The roster of authors is close to an all-star roster of American mystery talent, with many names, such as Lawrence Block, Evan Hunter and Sara Paretsky, familiar to a wide audience. The selections span the range of the genre, from gritty noir to historical. The writing is uniformly excellent, making it hard to single out individual stories for praise, but Donald E. Westlake's "Good Night! Good Night!" about a murder victim's search for his killer, which echoes Joel Townsley Rogers classic novel The Stopped Clock, and Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective tale, "Death of a Nobody," are standouts. Perhaps this volume's greatest virtue is providing a showcase for the gifts of lesser-known writers such as Stephen Wasylyk and Henry Slesar. This will be a must-have for all serious mystery readers. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From School Library JournalAdult/High School–In the middle of the last century, Hitchcock took popular culture by storm in a variety of media, including film, television, and short stories. Not a writer in any genre, his special genius was in identifying noir–and sometimes comic–tales told by others. Collected here are chronologically arranged exemplars of his taste. Opening with a story by hard-boiled champion Jim Thompson that appeared in the magazine in 1957 and ranging through such luminaries as Evan Hunter (writing as himself and as Ed McBain), Bill Pronzini, Lawrence Block, Sara Paretsky, and S. J. Rozan, and ending with Rhys Bowen's New Orleans-set tale of modern voodoo, these pieces have broad appeal. Each story has a terse paragraph introduction of its theme and its author's place in the field. The settings and plots are sorted across offices, city apartments, a small-town bank, and other common places. Some tales end with a surprise twist while others develop their momentum in a dreaded atmosphere. Mystery lovers may want to read the whole collection from cover to cover, while those not yet fans of the genre will, nonetheless, find one story or another worth the quarter hour it takes to consume. A good addition for collections serving students enrolled in short-story courses as well as for casual readers.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.